Poor Things

An unexpected final twist doesn't make the novel seem trivial but, on the contrary, gives the vivid melodrama a retrospective gravity. You become aware that this odd book has been a great deal more than entertaining only on finishing it. Then your strongest desire is to start reading it again. Bella Baxter surely merits a place among the holy innocents of literature Lemuel Gulliver, Don Quixote, Huck Finn, Prince Kropotkin and Holden Caulfield . . . Bound to call to mind other acidic commentaries on human folly Rasselas, Tristram Shandy, Candide. But can it be that Gray, with his fierce Hibernian contempt for 20th Century solutions for age-old problems, is the most piercing thorn on the bush? Lewis Carroll and Conan Doyle are acknowledged, but the authors Gray really revises are Sterne and Diderot, both comically self-analytic, Defoe, the creator of strong women, and Samuel Johnson or Voltaire, profound allegorists of the search for a good society . . . Poor Things is amusing and admirably angry, compassionate, and ironic as it looks in 1992 at the early days modern as well Victorian of a better nation. --Barbara Hardy Probably a crank, possibly a genius, certainly an original and independent voice, Alasdair Gray . . . has the look of a latter-day William Blake, with his extravagant myth-making, his strong social conscience, his liberating vision of sexuality and his flashes of righteous indignation tempered with scathing wit and sly self-mockery. --Merle Rubin Witty and delightfully written. --Geoff Ryman A riotously comic, up-to-date Victorian romance . . . deft and frolicsome. Gray here retells a tale that amalgamates Frankenstein and Candide . . . Along the way Gray offers delightful conversation, a tricksy triple ending, and some very witty writing. This work of inspired lunacy effectively skewers class snobbery, British imperialism, prudishness and the tenets of received wisdom. Witty and delightfully written.--Geoff Ryman

Alasdair Gray was born in 1934 in Glasgow, where he still lives. A painter as well as a writer, Mr. Gray describes himself as "an artist in words and pictures." He is the author of Poor Things, Lannark, and 1982 Janine, among other novels and story collections. Authors of the stories come from all over Scotland and represent a wide mix of gender, age and cultures. Celebrity contributors include Alexander McCall Smith, writer of the Number One Ladies Detective Agency series; award winning film and stage actor Brain Cox, Michael Rosen, who was Children's Poet Laureate from 2007 to 2009, and writer Janice Galloway, whose latest book was This is Not About Me.