In the city of Glasgow there is a lodging house for women known as 'The Rat Pit'. Here the vagrant can get a nightly bunk for a few pence...'The Rat Pit' is a transcript from life and most of the characters are real people and the scenes only too poignantly true. This is a fascinating novel of the period and still an interesting read. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original artwork and text.

A poet's war in the mud of the First World War in Europe. After the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Irishman Patrick MacGill enlisted in a territorial army unit the 2nd London Irish Battalion as a rifleman. His claim at the time was that he and its colonel were the only true Irishmen serving in it. MacGill, already a well regarded author and poet, would record his experiences from training to his unit's embarkation to France and then onwards to his early experiences of trench warfare and finally to the time of the great attacks which included the battle of Loos and in which he was seriously wounded. During the course of the war-which he survived-MacGill wrote several books on the subject, but three-The Amateur Army, The Red Horizon and The Great Push, directly concern his time with the London Irish and it is these books that have here been combined-in their entirety-by the Leonaur Editors to create this single comprehensive volume of his life as an ordinary rifleman in the front line. MacGill employs his talent to great effect in this volume so the reader is not only taken into the heart of the war through his sensitivity to the description of events, emotions, sights and details but also because of his ability to convey realistic dialogue that portrays the various types of the army in the trenches authentically and often with great affection and humour.

Based on personal memories of his life in Ireland and Scotland in the early 1900s, this was Patrick MacGill's first novel. It tells the story of Dermod Flynn an independent and feisty youth who earns a meagre living as an itinerant farm hand in Donegal and County Tyrone before coming to Scotland with a potato-picking squad. After living on the road, labouring and navvying, Dermod finds work on the hydro-electric scheme at Kinlochleven -an extraordinarily brutal and unforgiving environment where hundreds died on one of the biggest engineering projects of its time. Against this background, Dermod reads voraciously, begins to discover his talent as a writer and is eventually lured to Fleet Street, where he briefly becomes a journalist. Peopled with extraordinary characters, Children of the Dead End is a gritty and uncompromising expose of the near slavery endured by the poor in Scotland and Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century.