Lanark (Canongate Classics) [Hardcover]

Alasdair Gray's first novel Lanark (first published in 1981) immediately established him as one of the most important Scottish voices of his generation and this astounding work as one of the key British novels of the last century. Magnificent in its reach and unequalled in the adulation of its critical response, Lanark is a massive book.

Perversely we start our reading with Book 3--the hero of this and the last book in the quartet, the eponymous Lanark, lives in a bizarre and fantastical future in a grey, dreary city called Unthank. He doesn't remember how he got there nor who he really is. He hangs around a local cafe with some other young people whose values and mores he can't quite figure. All around people are disappearing. Then he contracts dragonhide... and disappears too. He wakes in an institute and is told the sad but instructional tale of Duncan Thaw (the boy he used to be, the boy, in a sense, Alasdair Gray used to be).

Duncan, unknowingly speaking of the epic of which he is the centre, who we meet as a child and watch grow into an artist , says "I want to write a modern Divine Comedy with illustrations in the style of William Blake." And it is Duncan's story that is the heart of Lanark--and what a poignant, heart-breaking tale it is. From a boy who can never accept or offer or understand love, who cannot connect, to an artist who cannot accept that he cannot have the final word--both in his own life and in his art--Duncan's tale is a beautifully crafted coming-of-age story.

Lanark is a work of huge imagination and wonderful range; it is about all of our selves, how we make them and make them up; it is about place and what that means for identity and it is about love--how we can learn to love our selves, or fail to, how we need to love, both ourselves and others, to create communities in which we can create art that will promote a continuing project of place in which we can love each other better. Lanark is peerless. --Mark Thwaite

'An ambitious and marvellously inventive novel.' --Malcolm Bradbury

'Remarkable ... Lanark is a work of loving and vivid imagination, yielding copious riches.'

'A quite extraordinary achievement, the most remarkable thing in Scottish fiction for a very long time.'

'Undoubtedly the best work of fiction written by a Scottish author for decades.'

From its first publication in 1981, Lanark was hailed as a masterpiece and it has come to be widely regarded as the most remarkable and influential Scottish novel of the second half of the twentieth century. A work of extraordinary imagination and wide-ranging concerns, its playful narrative conveys at its core a profound message, both personal and political, about humankind's inability to love, and yet our compulsion to go on trying. With its echoes of Dante, Blake, Joyce, Kafka, and Lewis Carroll, Lanark has been published all over the world and to unanimous acclaim. This collector's edition -- deluxe four-volume slipcased and numbered -- marks the novel's return to its original publisher and features a superb new introduction by the award-winning novelist Janice Galloway. In addition, it includes the author'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" Alasdair Gray is one of the most important living writers in English." -- Stephen Bernstein, The New York Times Book Review "Remarkable ... Lanark is a work of loving and vivid imagination, yielding copious riches." -- William Boyd, The Times Literary Supplement (London) "Undoubtedly the best work of fiction written by a Scottish author for decades." -- Time Out (London) "A quite extraordinary achievement, the most remarkable thing in Scottish fiction for a very long time." -- The Scotsman

"It was time Scotland produced a shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom. This is it." Anthony Burgess

"I was absolutely knocked out by Lanark. I think it's the best in Scottish literature this century." Iain Banks

"Remarkable...Lanark is a work of loving and vivid imagination, yielding copious riches" Times Literary Supplement

"A quite extraordinary achievement, the most remarkable thing in Scottish fiction for a very long time. It has changed the landscape. That in itself is astonishing. No one with any claims to be interested in or concerned with the state of our culture can ignore Lanark." Allan Massie, The Scotsman

"[Gray] is that rather rare bird among contemporary British writers - a genuine experimentalist, transgressing the rules of formal English prose ... boldly and imaginatively." David Lodge

" ... [the] masterful evocation ... of an adolescence and young manhood in post-1945 Glasgow, of early friendships and first love, of the stirring of artistic genius and its frustration, and of the subtle social prejudices that had to be learned as one grew up ... In a larger sense, the novel is an attempt to expose the ills that threaten modern society, an elaboration on a text in one of Gray's plates: "Let Glasgow flourish" - any and all Glasgows - by telling the truth." New York Review of Books

"When dawn comes up and retires in dismay, we find ourselves in the presence of an overpowering surreal imagination. A saga of a city where reality is about as reliable as a Salvador Dali watch." Brian Aldiss

"The landmark post-war Scottish novel. It fuses sci-fi, quasi-autobiography, and an apocalyptic vision into one of the wittiest, darkest, most readable books of the last fifty years." Magnus Linklater

"A quirky, crypto-Calvinist Divine Comedy [that] should be widely read." New York Times Book Review

"An ambitious and marvellously inventive novel." Malcolm Bradbury

"This book is more than a provincial or regional classic. Lanark's ambitions are large and so are its achievements: it's rare to come across a novel so rooted in a particular city and yet so accessible to those outside." William Boyd