1979, A Big Year In A Small Town

Published by Ebury Press (June 2004) ISBN-10:0091896711

Nineteen Seventy-nine takes place in a small fishing town called Musselburgh, situated on the east coast of Scotland. It's about a young girl who is very naive yet incredibly self-aware in the year that changed her life forever - an evocative, moving and at times hilarious true-life story about growing up gay in a small town, finding out you're adopted, and losing your father at the age of 14. Always an outsider, the Rhona of 1979 was desperate to fit in at any cost, and here lies the bittersweet humour. At the heart of the book is the Clubhouse, a place that symbolises all that is normal, happy, and secure. Sons with their fathers; 15 year-old boys with their girlfriends for their first underage drink. Wives with their husbands for the Christmas disco. And behind the club, outside, Rhona and her friends are smoking, fighting, kissing and drinking. In this darkly funny and deeply biographical first book, Rhona Cameron takes us back to a year when everything seemed to change. A new British government came to power, the Eighties were approaching and at times life felt so precarious that it really looked like she and her family might never make it through the next year, let alone the next decade...

The Naked Drinking Club

Published by Ebury Press (August 2008) ISBN-10:0091901847

'It was dark when I came to. What woke me was the cold and the water on my legs. I was doing spoons with Scotty, me behind him. We were on a beach. We didn't speak for the first minute, we were so disorientated. I had to genuinely think very hard about where I was. Then I remembered I was in Australia.' It's the late eighties and 24 year old Kerry has been drifting aimlessly through life in Edinburgh. Rarely having plans of any kind, she gets drunk and things happen: sex, drugs, parties, relationships, and, when she's really pushed, work. Setting off on a hastily arranged visit to Australia, Kerry packs only three items of clothing, a pair of flip-flops, two hundred pounds and her young persons' work visa. Soon broke, hungry and homeless, she joins ART, a likeable but mismatched band of travellers who sell dodgy oil paintings door-to-door in the suburbs. They are young, beautiful and free; drinking wildly as they travel through the country. But as their riotous road-trip continues, their lives become deeply entangled, and the drinking spirals out of control. Eventually, she is forced to admit that her journey to Australia isn't quite what it seems...