Lanark: a life in 4 books (86 page)

‘Compelling, a game of hide and seek where one never knows what will happen next … direct, stylish, crisp … a great adventure.’ Naomi Mitchison,
Spectator

‘Gray is a master at rummaging in the dustbins of the mind … Important and compelling.’
Daily Telegraph

‘The most remarkable new novel I have read this year, and in many ways the most remarkable book of any kind … the mature work, long in gestation, of an artist-writer of unique gifts in both modes, here most powerfully brought together.’
Herald

‘Probably the greatest Scottish novel of the century … it marked the beginning of a new era in Scottish writing.’
Observer

‘
Lanark
is one of the seminal works of Scottish literature, a book credited with kick-starting Scotland’s literary renaissance of the past two decades.’
Sunday Times

‘I read
Lanark
, mesmerised, in a few massive all-night sittings … subtle and complex, like an alarm clock going off, a wake-up call to another place, a place that was all around me, which I was part of, but that now seemed unfamiliar and exciting.’
Scotsman

‘At times exuberant, at times despairing, always vivid … Curious and informed, angry and rational … not afraid of fun or of confessing its vanities or of having Big Ideas.’
Sunday Times

‘This extraordinary masterpiece … is profoundly perceptive about the ways in which our society is destroying itself. Yet it manages to be funny and is written in a beautifully lucid prose.’
Times Literary
Supplement

‘Wonderful, expansive prose … a novel that is as rewarding to return to as it is vast in ambition: a modern classic in the true sense of the word.’
Big Issue in Scotland

‘The most remarkable first novel I’ve read for years … It’s unfair that any man, even from Dennistoun, should be so gifted … [
Lanark
] is allegorical, factual, political, cannibal (and very much so) … this is a book which will be remembered.’
Evening Times

First published in Great Britain in 1981
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE

This digital edition first published in 2008
by Canongate Books Ltd

Copyright © Alasdair Gray, 1969, 1981
Tailpiece copyright © Alasdair Gray, 2001
Introduction copyright © William Boyd, 2007

Portions of this work originally appeared in
Scottish International Review, Glasgow University Magazine
and
Words Magazine

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 84767 374 9

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