Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Books by Alasdair Gray
Alasdair Gray was a Scottish novelist, poet, and visual artist — one of the most original literary minds that Scotland has produced. Born in Glasgow in 1934, he spent nearly thirty years writing his first novel while also painting murals across the city. His books are difficult to categorise: they mix realism, satire, science fiction, body horror, feminist revisionism, and formal experimentation in ways that feel like nothing else. He died in December 2019, one day after his eighty-fifth birthday. The Yorgos Lanthimos film adaptation of Poor Things in 2023 introduced his work to readers who had never encountered it, which is a reasonable place to start — though not the only one. This is the essential Gray, in order.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction · Short Stories · Published 1981–2007
Novels
Lanark: A Life in Four Books
Gray spent nearly thirty years writing Lanark, and it shows — not as a fault but as an achievement. The novel is structured in four books published out of order: it opens with Books Three and Four, the fantastical story of a man called Lanark in the grim, bureaucratic city of Unthank, then rewinds to Books One and Two, which follow Duncan Thaw, a young Glasgow artist struggling with ambition, illness, and the specific difficulty of being alive in post-war Scotland. The two stories eventually converge, and the novel reveals itself to be a meditation on the relationship between imagined worlds and lived ones, between Glasgow as it is and Glasgow as it might be understood. Anthony Burgess called Gray “the best Scottish novelist since Walter Scott” on publication. Lanark was named one of the hundred greatest novels in the English language by The Guardian in 2003.
Lanark is one of the most formally ambitious novels in the British literary tradition, and the one Gray considered his most important work. It is not an easy read — it is dense, structurally unusual, and intermittently very dark — but it rewards the investment fully. The sections set in Unthank have a quality of nightmare that is unlike anything else in contemporary fiction, and the Duncan Thaw sections are among the most precise accounts of a young artist’s inner life available in the novel form. Read it before Poor Things if you want to understand what Gray was capable of at full stretch.
→ Find Lanark on AmazonShort Fiction
Unlikely Stories, Mostly
Gray’s first collection of short fiction, illustrated throughout with his own visual art. The stories range from satirical fables to body horror to Glaswegian social comedy, and several of them feel like rehearsals for the formal experiments Gray would carry further in his novels. The title — Unlikely Stories, Mostly — is typical of his tone: self-deprecating and slightly absurdist, the work of a man who was suspicious of the literary establishment and committed to telling the reader, at all times, that what they were reading was made up. The collection established Gray’s reputation as a short story writer of serious range and wit.
Unlikely Stories, Mostly is the best introduction to Gray’s shorter fiction and a good place to start if Lanark feels like too large a commitment on first approach. The stories are formally varied — some are realist, some are allegory, some are closer to prose poems — and they give a comprehensive picture of the range of registers he could operate in. His visual art, printed throughout, is also essential to understanding him: Gray was a painter as much as a writer, and the two practices are inseparable in his work.
→ Find Unlikely Stories, Mostly on AmazonNovels
1982, Janine
Jock McLeish, a middle-aged Scottish security supervisor, lies awake in a provincial hotel room drinking steadily and narrating the sexual fantasies he uses to anaesthetise himself against his life. This is the frame — but the novel is about much more than its provocative surface: it is about political self-betrayal, about Scotland’s relationship to England, about the distance between what people desire and what they are willing to admit they desire, and about the specific wreckage that can result from spending a life not being who you actually are. Gray himself considered it his best book. It is formally one of his most experimental: a single night, a single consciousness, the typography itself breaking apart at the novel’s crisis point in one of the most striking formal gestures in twentieth-century British fiction.
1982, Janine is harder to recommend without reservation because it requires the reader to spend considerable time inside a consciousness that is not always pleasant to inhabit. But it is also the book in which Gray’s intellectual and formal ambitions are most fully integrated: the sexual fantasy and the political allegory are not separate — they are the same argument made in different registers. The scene in which the typography disintegrates is one of the most genuinely shocking things in British fiction. Read it after Poor Things, not before.
→ Find 1982, Janine on AmazonThe Fall of Kelvin Walker
Originally written as a BBC television play, The Fall of Kelvin Walker follows a young Scotsman who arrives in London with supreme self-confidence and an absolute absence of qualifications, and proceeds to bluff his way to the top of British public life through sheer assertion. It is Gray’s shortest novel and his sharpest political satire: a Thatcher-era comedy about the relationship between confidence, class, media, and power that reads, in many respects, as more relevant now than when it was written. The novel is brief — barely more than a novella — and very funny in the specific, dry, Glasgow-inflected way that characterises Gray at his most accessible.
The Fall of Kelvin Walker is the Gray novel I recommend to readers who are uncertain whether they want to commit to Lanark but want something more than a short story. It is the most immediately accessible of his longer works — compact, funny, and formally conventional in ways his other novels are not — and it demonstrates what he could do when he turned his satirical intelligence to a single, contained target. A very good second book after Poor Things.
→ Find The Fall of Kelvin Walker on AmazonPoor Things
Bella Baxter is a young woman brought back to life in Victorian Scotland by the eccentric surgeon Archibald McCandless, using the brain of her unborn child. She grows up — rapidly, voraciously, without shame or apology — into a woman who wants to understand everything the world has to offer and is prevented by no one, including herself. Gray frames the novel as a set of competing documents — a memoir, an addendum, an editor’s notes — each of which contradicts or complicates the others, and the result is a book that cannot quite be trusted and knows it. Poor Things won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1992 and was adapted into a film by Yorgos Lanthimos, starring Emma Stone, in 2023, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and four Academy Awards.
Poor Things is on my bookshelf because it is one of the few novels that manages to be genuinely funny, formally experimental, politically serious, and emotionally devastating in the same breath — and because Bella Baxter is one of the great fictional characters in British literature. The novel is also the most immediate demonstration of what Gray’s visual practice meant for his fiction: the illustrations, fake documents, and typographical experiments are not ornamental, they are part of the argument. If you have only read one Gray, you have probably read this one. If you haven’t read it, start here.
→ Read my full thoughts on Poor Things → Find Poor Things on Amazon → Books like Poor Things — what to read nextA History Maker
Set in twenty-third-century Scotland, A History Maker follows Wat Dryhope, a young man in a post-scarcity society that has organised itself around periodic ritual warfare between clans — battles fought according to agreed rules, designed to provide excitement and meaning without genuine political consequence. When Wat wins an unsanctioned individual battle and becomes famous against his will, the novel examines what happens to a man who becomes a symbol in a society that has decided symbols are the only meaningful thing left. It is Gray’s most explicitly science-fictional novel, though it uses the future-setting in the same way he uses Gothic or Victorian framing elsewhere: as a distance that allows a clearer view of the present.
A History Maker is less widely read than Lanark or Poor Things but more worth reading than its relative obscurity suggests. Gray’s vision of a post-scarcity Scotland run by women while men compete in ceremonial violence is both absurdist and politically precise, and the novel’s central question — what do people do with themselves when material necessity no longer organises their time — has not become less relevant since 1994. A good book for readers who have already worked through his more celebrated novels and want to see the full range.
→ Find A History Maker on AmazonOld Men in Love
Gray’s final novel, published when he was seventy-two. Old Men in Love is built, like several of his other novels, as a set of competing documents — here, the journals of a retired Glasgow schoolteacher named John Tunnock, who is writing a sequence of historical fictions set in ancient Greece, nineteenth-century England, and a future Scotland, interspersed with his own increasingly urgent present-tense life. The novel is in part a meditation on what it means to keep writing when the body is failing, and in part a summation of the themes that had occupied Gray throughout his career: love, Scotland, class, creativity, mortality, and the difficulty of being a man who feels things more than he is permitted to express.
Old Men in Love rewards readers who have already spent time with Gray’s earlier work — it is his most intertextual novel, full of references and echoes that accumulate meaning if you have read what came before. As a final statement it is moving without being sentimental, and honest about age and diminishment in the way that only a writer who had spent forty years not flinching could be. Not the place to start, but a very good place to end.
→ Find Old Men in Love on AmazonFrequently asked questions about Alasdair Gray
What books did Alasdair Gray write?
Alasdair Gray wrote ten novels and several collections of short stories. His most important novels are Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), which is widely considered his masterwork; 1982, Janine (1984), which he considered his personal best; Poor Things (1992), which won the Whitbread Prize and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film by Yorgos Lanthimos in 2023; and The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985), A History Maker (1994), and Old Men in Love (2007). His short story collection Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983) is also essential. Gray was also a visual artist and illustrated all his own books.
Which Alasdair Gray book should I read first?
Start with Poor Things. It is his most accessible novel, the most formally complete demonstration of what his fiction does, and — since the Lanthimos film — the one most readers already have some purchase on. If Poor Things works for you, the next book depends on what you want: The Fall of Kelvin Walker if you want something short and satirical; Lanark if you are ready for something much longer and more demanding; Unlikely Stories, Mostly if you want to see his range in a shorter form. 1982, Janine is best left until you have a sense of his work, because its surface — a middle-aged man narrating his sexual fantasies — is deliberately alienating in a way that the rest of his fiction is not.
What is Lanark about?
Lanark is a novel in four books published out of order — it opens with Books Three and Four, the fantastical story of a man called Lanark in the grim, bureaucratic city of Unthank, then rewinds to Books One and Two, which follow Duncan Thaw, a young Glasgow artist in post-war Scotland. The two narratives eventually converge. The novel is simultaneously a realist portrait of working-class Glasgow, a dystopian allegory about institutional power, a Bildungsroman about a young artist, and a formally experimental text that comments on its own construction. Anthony Burgess said on publication that Gray was “the best Scottish novelist since Walter Scott.” It was named one of the hundred greatest novels in the English language by The Guardian.
Is Poor Things based on a book?
Yes. Poor Things was a novel by Alasdair Gray published in 1992, thirty years before Yorgos Lanthimos adapted it into the Oscar-winning film starring Emma Stone. The novel won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1992. It is structured as a set of competing documents — a memoir, an addendum, an editor’s notes — each of which contradicts the others, and it is illustrated throughout with Gray’s own visual art. The film is a faithful adaptation of the novel’s spirit and central plot, though it simplifies the formal complexity of the original. The book is the better place to start.
Was Alasdair Gray also an artist?
Yes, and the visual art is inseparable from the literary work. Gray studied design and mural painting at the Glasgow College of Art and spent decades creating murals across Glasgow, including the ceiling of the Òran Mór arts venue, which took him four years and is considered one of his major works. All his books are illustrated by him, and the relationship between the visual and the verbal is central to his fiction: the fake documents, typographical experiments, and hand-lettered chapter headings are not decorative additions but part of the argument of each book. Several of his works are in the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland.
More from the shelf
From the bookshelf
“Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.” — Alasdair Gray
More hand-picked recommendations on my personal bookshelf — books that stay with you long after the last page.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations