The cult classic novel of dreamlike fantasy and psychological realism by the author of Poor Things: A work of “vivid imagination, yielding copious riches.”—The Times Literary Supplement
From its first publication in 1981, Alasdair Gray’s Lanark was hailed as a masterpiece, inspiring Anthony Burgess to proclaim Gray the most important Scottish novelist since Walter Scott. With its echoes of Dante, Blake, Joyce, Kafka, and Lewis Carroll, Lanark has been published around the world to unanimous acclaim.
A man wakes up on a train with no memory and seashells in his pockets. He finds himself arriving in a peculiar place called Unthank—where the sun only comes up part-way and the inhabitants are prone to disappearing. He names himself Lanark and soon encounters a gallery of characters who suffer from joblessness, alienation, and strange maladies. The novel’s time-shifting narrative then draws readers into Lanark’s former life in Glasgow as it explores its twin themes of humankind’s inability to love and our compulsion to go on trying.
This edition of Lanark features an introduction by the award-winning novelist Janice Galloway, as well as “Gray’s Tailpiece,” a fascinating addendum to the novel.
“It was time Scotland produced a shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom. This is it.” —Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange
“A quite extraordinary achievement, the most remarkable thing in Scottish fiction for a very long time.” —Scotsman
Born in 1934, Alasdair Gray graduated in design and mural painting from the Glasgow School of Art. Since 1981, when Lanark was published by Canongate, he authored, designed and illustrated seven novels, several books of short stories, a collection of his stage, radio and TV plays and a book of his visual art, A Life in Pictures. In November 2019, he received a Lifetime Achievement award from the Saltire Society.He died in December 2019, aged eighty-five.
Debut novels are often intimate in theme, small in scope, and under-read. When big, sprawling books seem to drop from nowhere, they usually boast, on a closer look, a small backlog of underappreciated siblings. Not so with these five knockout debuts, which span genres, readerships, countries, and eras—or, in one case, do none of these […]
