Nobody’s Empire by Stuart Murdoch (2025)

From the Publisher

One of the great lyricists of our time, the lead singer and songwriter for the iconic Glasgow-based band Belle and Sebastian, pens a sensitive and intimate account—his debut novel based on his own youthful experiences—of dark days leading to light and a coming of age through music.

It’s the early 1990s in Glasgow, Scotland, and Stephen has emerged from a lengthy hospital stay. Diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, a little-understood disease which has robbed him of any prospects of work, friends, or independent living, he moves slowly toward new goals and meets others like him, including Richard, a friend from school, and Carrie, a young woman bedridden for five years. Feeling isolated and alone, they form their own support group, and try to get by with as little money and pain as possible. Since he’s been ill, Stephen never feels warm, inspiring Carrie to affectionately call him “The World’s Coldest Boy.” As the world seems to care less for them, the trio start to care less about fitting in with the world.

Stephen soon discovers he has a talent for writing songs. He awakens to the possibility of a spiritual life that transcends the everyday, and feels a calling for a place that might as well be on the other end of the universe let alone the world. Buoyed by tentative hope, he and Richard leave Glasgow in search of a cure in the mythic warmth and sun of California. As they float between hostels, sofas, and park benches, they discover the trip is life-changing in ways neither expected, and Stephen embraces a new-world reinvention that will change his life forever.

Melodic and captivating, filled with graceful notes, melancholic chords, and witty, thoughtful riffs on life’s infinite possibilities and curiosities, Nobody’s Empire is a warm and wonderful coming-of-age novel, imbued with Stuart Murdoch’s magical lyricism.

Nobody’s Empire by Stuart Murdoch

There are plenty of artists who cross genres into writing books—actors, directors, and musicians have all tried this form of creative expression. It doesn’t surprise me that musicians venture into the literary genre, especially singer-songwriters, who only have to trade their microphone for a pen to tell a story that sings. Stuart Murdoch, the singer-songwriter behind Belle and Sebastian, the Scottish indie-pop band that gained acclaim in the early ‘90s behind Murdoch’s witty lyrics and gorgeous melodies, seems perfectly suited to the task. Besides writing several albums that now span decades, Murdoch has published The Celestial Café, a collection of blog entries, poems, and lyrics, and written and directed a film, 2014’s God Help the Girl, about a lost and lonely young woman who starts a band with friends in Glasgow.

The film, clearly inspired by artsy cinema like the French New Wave and music-focused movies like A Hard Day’s Night, was quietly ambitious but a bit too self-indulgent. Nobody’s Empire, while also centered on charming nerds who find meaning in music, somehow doesn’t wear out its welcome, if you’re willing to settle in with its discursive storytelling. Maybe it’s because Murdoch already has a well-worn gift for expressing a mood and a vision and an idea through words, without the added burden of the cinematic medium.

Most Belle and Sebastian superfans will recognize that Nobody’s Empire—which is named after an album and song by the band—is more or less an autofiction version of Murdoch’s own life story. During the San Francisco stop of his book tour last month, Murdoch confirmed this, saying that he found it a bit easier artistically to have the freedom to fictionalize this time in his life, which was just before he started Belle and Sebastian. It centers on Stephen, a young man in Glasgow in the early ‘90s who has to pause his university career to look after his health. Stephen, like Murdoch, suffers from constant fatigue syndrome—also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME for short. Stephen and his friends Richard and Carrie, who also have ME, go on government assistance while they look for their own answers and support for their condition.

Stephen is an art-school nerd, a music aficionado, and a walking broken heart, having recently been dumped by his girlfriend Vivian. He’s known by friends as “The World’s Coldest Boy,” which could double as a description of his physical and emotional ailments. He organizes a support group for ME sufferers in the Glasgow area—a “Fellowship of the Retiring.” He falls in and out of crushes, he goes dancing when he feels up to it, and he waxes poetic about “this magical activity called music.” On the dancefloor at an indie club in Glasgow, he finds “liberty and sensation… stepping out into the dappled light, into the sacred space… This was energy-giving, not energy-sapping.”

Stephen gives some insight into chronic fatigue syndrome, or his experience of it at least. “Imagine having the first day of a cold or the flu every day of your life…[feeling] poisoned every day.” A bit aimless in Glasgow, he and his friends’ main ambition was “to wake up healthier than the evening before… to get by, cheap, sick, and nasty, in the northern city of your choice.”

But finding answers to ME at a time when the internet was still nascent proves difficult, so Stephen and Richard get it into their heads that sunnier, warmer places might offer a better cure. They eventually land on going to America for a bit of a health sabbatical, sell their records and other belongings to buy plane tickets, and head off to California. Stephen daydreams about his fantasy land through the lens of his favorite bands and movies: “I liked the Minutemen… and I liked Hüsker Dü and the Meat Puppets and Sonic Youth. I liked the punky scratchy side of things. I loved the way America was portrayed in Slackers and Clerks and She’s Gotta Have It.”

Stephen and Richard pack some eventful mini-adventures into their stay in San Francisco and San Diego. They have romantic adventures with young American women, while Stephen sees some indie bands and fortuitously meets college radio deejays and musicians. Falling in love with people and places in America, Stephen seems enchanted and revived. His descriptions of taking the bus in San Francisco to the proto-hipster Mission district turn a normally mundane activity into something vibrant and wondrous. “When you don’t have anywhere to go and you have all day, transportation becomes the ends not the means,” he says. And he describes the somewhat grimy sidewalks of the Mission with an outsider’s enchanted eyes: “It was sunnier [than the rest of the city], and it was like no place I had ever been to… Mission Street seemed to me to be in a constant state of carnival.”

the book reminds me to keep looking for magic in my everyday existence

Eventually, Stephen and Richard return to Scotland having gained a bit of perspective, even if they don’t have any solid answers to their physical and emotional ailments. But readers get a glimpse into the kind of trip that everyone needs at least once in their lives—anywhere out of your comfort zone. As a longtime San Franciscan who’s walked the same streets described in the book but often seen only grey and grime, the book reminds me to keep looking for magic in my everyday existence.

Knowing Belle and Sebastian’s origin story, the book portends a promising future. But even if you’re not a fan of the band, the book stands on its own with prose as pretty as Murdoch’s lyrics, and as a delightful bit of creative wayfaring—the art of wandering as a means and an end.