Melvin Podgorski is young, na ve, American - and a coffee fanatic. It's this passion that leads him from his native Chicago to 1990s Glasgow to scout out the prospects for a US coffee franchise. Looking for an escape from his suffocatingly suburban parents and the tangled wreckage of a divorce, he finds himself floundering in an alien land of Glaswegian dialect and radical student politics. As he becomes increasingly entangled with one particularly charming local and her militant ex-boyfriend, his efforts to keep the past and the present separate are put to the test, and soon his old life in Chicago and his recently found freedom in Glasgow are set for an emotional and catastrophic collision . . . Imbued with dark, mournful notes, dashes of warm humour and the bittersweet tang of learning the hard way, Javascotia combines a feel-good flavour with a deep substance.