Lanark
10 best books like Lanark (Alasdair Gray): Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, The Black Sheep, Docherty (Coronet Books), Sybil, or the Two Nations, A Disaffection, The Bottle Factory Outing, Darconville’s Cat, Morvern Callar, Young Adam, The Trick is to Keep Breathing
On a rainy Sunday in January, the recently widowed Mrs. Palfrey arrives at the Claremont Hotel where she will spend her remaining days. Her fellow residents are magnificently eccentric and endlessly curious, living off crumbs of affection and snippets of gossip. Together, upper lips stiffened,...
| Author | Honoré de Balzac |
| ISBN | 0140442375 |
The novel begins in 1792 with a long and rather dull preamble givinge history to the Rouget family, and as it happens this is vital to understanding the last part of the tale. Agathe Rouget is the daughter of a rather nasty doctor, that seems to be putting it mildly, and Balzac laces the tale of Doctor Rouget...
| Author | William McIlvanney |
| ISBN | 0340407573 |
His face made a fist at the world. The twined remnant of umbilicus projected vulnerably. Hands, feet and prick. He had come equipped for the job.
Newborn Conn Docherty, raw as a fresh wound, lies between his parents in their tenement room, with no birthright but a life's labour in the pits of his...
| Author | Benjamin Disraeli |
| ISBN | 0809594447 |
The book is a roman à thèse, or a novel with a thesis -- which was meant to create a furor over the squalor that was plaguing England's working class cities. The general reader whose attention has not been specially drawn to the subject which these volumes aim to illustrate, the Condition of the People,...
| Author | James Kelman |
| ISBN | 0330307363 |
Patrick Doyle is a 29-year-old teacher in an ordinary school. Disaffected, frustrated and increasingly bitter at the system he is employed to maintain, Patrick begins his rebellion, fuelled by drink and his passionate, unrequited love for a fellow teacher. A Disaffection is the apparently straightforward...
| Author | Beryl Bainbridge |
| ISBN | 0786701463 |
Ten cheers for Beryl, I intend to read everything by her eventually. Her career was a major successful brow-swerve - she wasn't highbrow, lowbrow or middlebrow, she just banged along on her rickety typewriter smoking 25 ciggies per hour and coughing her lungs out, entirely in her own bubble, and such...
| Author | Alexander Theroux |
| ISBN | 0805043659 |
The main story is a love affair between Alaric Darconville, an English professor at a Virginia women's college, and one of his students, Isabel.
The style relies on complex syntax and unusual words. The satire is broad, and uses southern culture cliches but is often very funny. Some of the names...
Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket in a desolate and beautiful port town in the west of Scotland, wakes one morning in late December to find her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on the kitchen floor. Morvern's reaction is both intriguing and immoral. What...
| Author | Alexander Trocchi |
| ISBN | 0802139779 |
Joe is a drifter who works as a hired hand on a barge traveling the Clyde River between Glasgow and Edinburgh. As the story opens, he finds the corpse of a young woman drifting downstream. Was it an accident? Suicide? Murder? As the police investigate and arrest a suspect, it becomes apparent that Joe knew...
| Author | Janice Galloway |
| ISBN | 1564780813 |
Janice Galloway's inventive first novel is about the breakdown of a 27-year-old drama teacher named Joy Stone. The problems of everyday living accumulate and begin to torture Joy, who blames her problems not on her work or on the accidental drowning of her illicit lover, but on herself. While painful...
| Author | Anne Donovan |
| ISBN | 1841954519 |
Anne Marie's dad, a Glaswegian painter and decorator, has always been game for a laugh. So when he first takes up meditation at the Buddhist Center, no one takes him seriously. But as Jimmy becomes more involved in a search for the spiritual, his beliefs start to come into conflict with the needs of his...
| Author | George Mackay Brown |
| ISBN | 0862418143 |
Seamus Heaney once remarked that George Mackay Brown passed everything “through the eye of the needle of Orkney”, those remote islands north of Scotland where he was born and spent his life. This observation is certainly true of Magnus. The novel treats of aristocratic ambition, rousing...
| Author | Neil M. Gunn |
| ISBN | 0571200788 |
This 1941 novel is what you may choose as a holiday book or, as I did, to read its near 600 pages over the Christmas period. First and foremost it’s one of those lovely warm stories to become immersed in, unworried about its cleverness or literary wit. Easy to hold up as an example of the ‘classic realist...
| Author | Lewis Grassic Gibbon |
A Scots Quair is revolutionary—innovative in its form, deft and humorous in its use of the Scots language, courageous in its characterization and politics. Central to the trilogy is Chris Guthrie, one of the most remarkable female characters in modern literature. In Sunset Song, Gibbon's finest...
Michael Pendreich is curating an exhibition of photographs by his late, celebrated father Angus for the National Gallery of Photography in Edinburgh. The show will cover fifty years of Scottish life but, as he arranges the images and writes his catalogue essay, what story is Michael really trying...
| Author | Michael Frayn |
| ISBN | 0140040633 |
An utter delight.
Even though it was written in the 1970s, it still feels completely fresh & topical today. It's a lovely, optimistic satire of man & covers many of the Big Ideas. I know when Life of Pi was so very popular, various reviews said it would affirm/renew your faith in God (a...
| Author | J.G. Ballard |
| ISBN | 0871404192 |
When a light aircraft crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, the young pilot who struggles to the surface minutes later seems to have come back from the dead. Within hours everything in the dormitory suburb is transformed. Vultures invade rooftops, luxuriant tropical vegetation overruns the quiet...
| Author | Iain Sinclair |
| ISBN | 0141014857 |
Downriver is a brilliant London novel by its foremost chronicler, Iain Sinclair.
WINNER OF THE ENCORE AWARD AND THE JAMES TAIT BLACK MEMORIAL PRIZE
The Thames runs through Downriver like an open wound, draining the pain and filth of London and its mercurial inhabitants. Commissioned...
| Author | Compton Mackenzie |
| ISBN | 0099453541 |
It's 1943 and the war has brought rationing to the Hebridean islands of Great and Little Todday. When food is in short supply, it is bad enough, but when the whisky runs out, it looks like the end of the world.
Morale is at rock bottom. George Campbell needs a wee dram to give him the courage to stand...
| Author | Lisa Goldstein |
| ISBN | 0553050907 |
I can’t remember how I found out about this novel, presumably a list of recommendations somewhere? The combination of surrealists, dreams, time travel, and revolution had obvious appeal and the library didn't have it, so I bought a cheap copy off eBay. Unfortunately I think it had been stored in a...
