Author Guide · Scottish Fiction
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Alasdair Gray (1934–2019), the Scottish novelist and artist, was forty-six when his first novel came out. He had been writing Lanark since his student days at Glasgow School of Art, while painting murals across Glasgow to pay the rent, and when it appeared in 1981 it was printed in the order Book Three, One, Two, Four, with an epilogue four chapters before the end. Anthony Burgess put him at the top of Scottish fiction since Walter Scott. Eleven years later Poor Things won the Whitbread Novel Award, and in 2024 its film adaptation won four Oscars. He designed and illustrated nearly every book himself. This guide covers his fourteen key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 14 key books · 1981–2012 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Alasdair Gray (1934–2019) was a Glasgow novelist, poet and painter. He published fourteen books of fiction between 1981 and 2012; the best known are Lanark (1981), his masterpiece, and Poor Things (1992), which won the Whitbread Novel Award and became Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 film. Start with Lanark, or with Poor Things if you want something shorter. Below: all fourteen in order, plus the poetry, politics and Dante outside them.
Where to Start with Alasdair Gray
If you want the masterpiece
→ Lanark (1981) — long, strange and out of order, the book people mean when they call Gray a great novelist.
If you want the one you have heard of
→ Poor Things (1992) — short, funny, and the source of the 2023 film.
If you want to see what he could do in ten pages
→ Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983) — or the whole of Every Short Story if you are in for the long haul.
If you want his politics as science fiction
→ A History Maker (1994).
14 Alasdair Gray Books, in Order
Lanark
Two lives, told in four books printed in the order three, one, two, four. Duncan Thaw is an asthmatic art student in wartime and post-war Glasgow who fails as a painter; Lanark arrives with no memory in Unthank, a sunless city where people grow “dragonhide” when they cannot feel. Near the end, Lanark meets his own author. It won the first Saltire Society Book of the Year award in 1982 and was also named Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year.
In the 2016 poll of Scotland’s favourite books, run by BBC Scotland with the Scottish Book Trust, it came third, behind Sunset Song and The Wasp Factory. Anthony Burgess called Gray the best Scottish novelist since Walter Scott.
— LisanneUnlikely Stories, Mostly
Fables, satires and philosophical jokes, some written decades before they were published: a boy who swallows a fallen star, a court poet in an empire that declares people unnecessary, and two stories about a tower meant to reach heaven. It won the Cheltenham Prize for Literature in 1983.
The book carries the line he is now best known for: “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation”, which he adapted from the Canadian poet Dennis Lee. It is engraved in the Scottish Parliament.
— Lisanne1982, Janine
Jock McLeish, divorced, alcoholic and nearly fifty, a supervisor of security-alarm installations, spends one night in a Scottish hotel room inventing pornographic fantasies that keep turning back into his own past. In chapter eleven the page splits into parallel voices, one of them God’s, as he swallows an overdose; he brings the pills up and faces the morning.
The most divisive book he wrote: the poet Peter Levi called it “radioactive hogwash”, while Will Self later introduced an edition defending it. Gray himself thought it his best book.
— LisanneThe Fall of Kelvin Walker
Kelvin leaves a small Scottish town, throws off a strict Calvinist upbringing and talks his way into London television in the 1960s, where nerve alone makes him a star interviewer. Then it comes apart and he goes home.
It began life as a BBC television play in 1968, seventeen years before the novel.
— LisanneLean Tales
A three-way collection with James Kelman and Agnes Owens: Gray wanted to publish his own stories, did not have enough of them, and asked two friends to fill the book.
It put the three writers who reshaped Scottish fiction in the 1980s between the same covers, with Gray designing the book.
— LisanneSomething Leather
June, a conventional office worker in Glasgow, has her head shaved, is dressed in leather and is drawn into the world of the women who run a leather shop. Around that sit chapters about other Glasgow lives, and an epilogue in which Gray answers his critics.
Gray complained that reviewers read the whole book as a sadomasochistic adventure when that material fills two of its chapters.
— LisanneMcGrotty and Ludmilla
Aladdin moved to Whitehall: a junior civil servant gets hold of a secret government report, and the report is the magic lamp. A short, poisonous comedy about how power is actually handed over.
Gray described it exactly that way himself, as an Aladdin story with a wicked uncle in the senior civil service.
— LisannePoor Things
In late nineteenth-century Glasgow, the surgeon Godwin Baxter revives a drowned pregnant woman by giving her the brain of her own unborn child. She becomes Bella Baxter, who learns the world at speed and refuses to be told what she is. The novel is built as found documents, and Bella’s own letter at the end says the man who wrote the rest of it made most of it up.
Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 film won four Academy Awards, including Best Actress for Emma Stone, and moved the story out of Glasgow into a retrofuturist London.
— LisanneTen Tales Tall & True
Ten stories in contemporary Scotland, moving between social realism, comedy, science fiction and satire, mostly about people looking for someone to dominate or to be dominated by.
The cover shows ten animal tails; each animal turns up in one of the stories.
— LisanneA History Maker
Twenty-third-century Scotland, in the Ettrick borders, after technology has made everything abundant and capitalism unnecessary. Women hold the real power; men win status in ritual clan warfare. Wat Dryhope, a celebrated war hero, is pulled into a plot to bring capitalism back by starting a real war.
The most science-fictional of his novels, and the one that most directly argues with the politics of the 1990s.
— LisanneMavis Belfrage
The title story follows an Anglo-Scottish relationship and the quiet power struggle inside it, and is printed with five shorter tales.
Filed by libraries as a novel, but the subtitle says what it really is.
— LisanneThe Ends of Our Tethers
Thirteen late stories about irritation, decline and old age, from a writer then in his late sixties, still changing form from story to story.
His last original collection.
— LisanneOld Men in Love
The posthumous papers of John Tunnock, a retired Glasgow schoolmaster, edited by a character called Alasdair Gray. Tunnock’s unfinished fiction jumps between the Athens of Socrates, the Florence of Fra Lippo Lippi and a Victorian cult leader, with the diary of an old man in Glasgow running underneath.
His last novel, published when he was seventy-two, with an afterword by Sidney Workman, the fictional critic who had been attacking Gray’s books since Lanark.
— LisanneEvery Short Story
Everything in one volume: Unlikely Stories, Mostly, his half of Lean Tales, Ten Tales Tall & True, The Ends of Our Tethers, the Glasgow chapters of Something Leather, and the uncollected work, starting with “The Star”, written in 1951.
The hardback is stamped with a variant of his famous line: “Work as if you live in the early days of a better world.”
— LisanneIn What Order to Read Alasdair Gray
There is no series to follow. Every book stands alone, so the order is about how much of him you want at once. Start with Poor Things or Unlikely Stories, Mostly: both are short, funny and show his habit of building a book out of documents, footnotes and his own drawings.
Then Lanark, once you know you like him: it is long, and it starts with Book Three. After that, 1982, Janine if you can take it, and A History Maker if you want his politics in science-fiction form. If you came from the film, Books like Poor Things goes further.
A reading path
1. Poor Things (1992)
2. Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)
3. Lanark (1981)
4. 1982, Janine (1984)
5. A History Maker (1994)
Everything Else Alasdair Gray Published
Beyond the 14 key books: 14 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Poetry and Dante
6
6 books · 1989–2020
- 1989Old Negativeshis first book of poems
- 2000Sixteen Occasional Poems
- 2010Collected Verse
- 2018HellDante’s Inferno, decorated and “Englished in prosaic verse”
- 2019Purgatorythe second part of his Dante
- 2020Paradisethe last part, published after his death
Politics, prefaces and autobiography
6
6 books · 1992–2014
- 1992Why Scots Should Rule Scotlanda pamphlet, revised in 1997 for the devolution referendum
- 2000The Book of Prefacesan anthology of prefaces in English, edited, annotated and designed by Gray
- 2001A Short Survey of Classic Scottish Writing
- 2005How We Should Rule Ourselveswith the constitutional lawyer Adam Tomkins
- 2010A Life in Pictureshis life told through his own paintings, murals and book designs
- 2014Of Me & Othersan autobiography in essays
Plays
2
2 books · 2009–2011
- 2009A Gray Play Bookhis collected plays
- 2011Flecka verse comedy on the Faust story
The years · 1934–2019
Quick facts about Alasdair Gray
- Known for
- Turning Glasgow into a place of myth in Lanark and Poor Things, books he wrote, illustrated and designed himself, and a line about a better nation now carved into the Scottish Parliament.
- 1934
- Born in Riddrie, Glasgow
- 1952
- Enters Glasgow School of Art
- 1981
- Lanark
- 1992
- Poor Things
- 2004
- His “better nation” line on the Scottish Parliament
- 2019
- Dies in Glasgow, aged 85
- Born
- 28 December 1934, Riddrie, Glasgow
- Died
- 29 December 2019, Glasgow, the day after his 85th birthday
- Education
- Glasgow School of Art, 1952–1957, design and mural painting
- Also a painter
- Murals at Òran Mór, the Ubiquitous Chip and Hillhead subway station
- Prizes
- Whitbread Novel Award and Guardian Fiction Prize for Poor Things (1992); Saltire Society Lifetime Achievement Award (2019)
- Taught
- Professor of creative writing at Glasgow and Strathclyde universities, 2001–2003
- On screen
- Poor Things (2023), four Academy Awards
The red mark is 1981: Lanark, published when he was forty-six, after nearly thirty years of writing it.
How Alasdair Gray Wrote: The Whole Book, Made by Hand
He made the whole book. Gray designed his own covers, endpapers and typography and drew the illustrations, so his books look like nothing else on the shelf. In 1982, Janine the typography itself breaks apart in chapter eleven, and Lanark carries an “Index of Plagiarisms” listing what he borrowed.
Fake editors and found papers. Poor Things is presented as documents Gray merely edited, and Old Men in Love as a dead schoolmaster’s papers. The books argue with themselves, and the reader has to decide whom to believe.
Glasgow as an imagined city. He wrote Glasgow when it barely existed in serious fiction and turned it into Unthank in Lanark: the real city and a nightmare version of it, side by side. For writers who share his mix of the real and the impossible, see Authors like Alasdair Gray.
Frequently asked questions about Alasdair Gray
Who was Alasdair Gray?
Alasdair Gray (28 December 1934 – 29 December 2019) was a Scottish novelist, short-story writer, poet, playwright and painter from Glasgow. He is best known for Lanark (1981) and Poor Things (1992), for the murals he painted across Glasgow, and for the line “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation”.
How many books did Alasdair Gray write?
Fourteen books of fiction between 1981 and 2012, all listed on this page: nine novels by the usual count (including the novella McGrotty and Ludmilla and Mavis Belfrage, a short novel printed with five tales) and five story collections, counting Lean Tales, shared with James Kelman and Agnes Owens, and the 2012 omnibus Every Short Story. With his poetry, plays, political pamphlets, The Book of Prefaces, two autobiographical books and a three-volume Dante, he published about thirty books in all.
What are Alasdair Gray’s books in order?
Lanark (1981), Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983), 1982, Janine (1984), The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985), Lean Tales (1985), Something Leather (1990), McGrotty and Ludmilla (1990), Poor Things (1992), Ten Tales Tall & True (1993), A History Maker (1994), Mavis Belfrage (1996), The Ends of Our Tethers (2003), Old Men in Love (2007) and Every Short Story 1951–2012 (2012).
Which Alasdair Gray book should I read first?
If you want the book his publisher and his critics lead with, Lanark. If you want something shorter and funnier, Poor Things. For a taste in ten pages, Unlikely Stories, Mostly.
What is Alasdair Gray’s most famous book?
Lanark among critics and Scottish readers: it came third in a 2016 BBC poll of Scotland’s favourite books. Since the 2023 film, Poor Things is the one most readers have heard of.
Which Oscar-winning film is based on an Alasdair Gray novel?
Poor Things. Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 film is based on Gray’s 1992 novel of the same name. It won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2023 and four Academy Awards in March 2024 — Best Actress for Emma Stone, Production Design, Costume Design, and Makeup and Hairstyling. Gray died four years before it came out.
Is the film Poor Things based on a book?
Yes. Poor Things was published in 1992, thirty-one years before the film. The novel is set in Glasgow and is built out of contradictory documents; the film moves it to an invented London and drops the Scottish setting.
What was Alasdair Gray’s first book?
Lanark: A Life in Four Books, published in 1981, when he was forty-six. His earliest story, “The Star”, dates from 1951, when he was sixteen; it opens Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983).
What is Lanark about?
Two lives that turn out to be one: Duncan Thaw, an art student in post-war Glasgow, and Lanark, who arrives without a memory in a sunless city called Unthank. The four books are printed in the order three, one, two, four. It was adapted for the stage by David Greig as Lanark: A Life in Three Acts at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2015; it has never been filmed.
Is it Alasdair Gray or Alastair Gray?
Alasdair Gray, with an s and no t, and Gray with an a. Alastair, Alistair, Alisdair and Grey are all common misspellings of the Scottish novelist who wrote Lanark and Poor Things.
Did Alasdair Gray win any prizes?
Lanark won the first Saltire Society Book of the Year award and was named Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year; Unlikely Stories, Mostly won the Cheltenham Prize for Literature in 1983; Poor Things won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1992. In 2019 he received the Saltire Society’s first Lifetime Achievement Award.
Was Alasdair Gray an artist as well as a writer?
Yes. He studied design and mural painting at Glasgow School of Art from 1952 to 1957 and painted murals all his life. Several survive, including the ceiling of Òran Mór on Byres Road, the walls of the Ubiquitous Chip and a mural at Hillhead subway station. He also illustrated and designed his own books.
Where does “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation” come from?
From Gray, who adapted it from the Canadian poet Dennis Lee’s “Civil Elegies” (“in the early days of a better civilization”) and used it in Unlikely Stories, Mostly in 1983. It was carved into the Canongate Wall of the Scottish Parliament building when it opened in 2004.
Is Alasdair Gray still alive?
No. He died in Glasgow on 29 December 2019, the day after his 85th birthday. His Dante translation was completed with Paradise, published in 2020.
Was Alasdair Gray anti-English?
He denied it. In “Settlers and Colonists”, an essay in the 2012 anthology Unstated: Writers on Scottish Independence, he divided English people working in Scottish arts into long-term “settlers”, whom he welcomed, and short-term “colonists” looking to return to England, and named Vicky Featherstone of the National Theatre of Scotland among the latter. Politicians and the theatre objected; Gray answered that he did not feel anti-English and that his mother’s people were English.
Footnotes
- Alasdair Gray — Wikipedia
- Alasdair Gray bibliography — Wikipedia
- Lanark: A Life in Four Books — Wikipedia
- 1982, Janine — Wikipedia
- Alasdair Gray attacks English for ‘colonising’ arts — The Scotsman, 2012
- Alasdair Gray (2014 event) — Edinburgh International Book Festival
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.”
— Alasdair Gray, Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983), adapted from Dennis Lee
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