Poor Things: Alasdair Gray (A Harvest Book) - Softcover

Gray, Alasdair.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156000687 ISBN 13: 9780156000680

Publisher: Thomson Learning, 1994

Synopsis

With its tantalizing reminders of Mary Shelley, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Lewis Carroll, this is an up-todate nineteenth-century novel, informed by a thoroughly twentieth-century sensibility. Set in and around Glasgow and the Mediterranean in the early 1880s, it describes the love lives of two Scottish doctors and a twenty-five-year-old woman who has been created by one of them from human remains. A story of true love and scientific daring, it whirls the reader from the private operating rooms of late-Victorian Glasgow through aristocratic casinos, low-life Alexandria, and a Parisian bordello, reaching an interrupted climax in a Scottish church. It contains many unsanctified weddings, but hardly any perversions, and, as the Spectator put it, "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."

About this title

Review:

"It wouldn't be an exaggeration to hail Alasdair Gray as one of Scotlands greatest living novelists." -- The List Festival Guide 9-15th August 2001

"The greatest Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott" -- Anthony Burgess

'A marvellous, endearing book ... a virtuoso feat of literary ventriloquism' -- New Statesman and Society

'The greatest Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott' -- Anthony Burgess

'This work of inspired lunacy effectively skewers class snobbery, British imperialism, prudishness and the tenets of received wisdom' -- Publishers Weekly

'Witty and delightfully written' -- New York Times Book Review

About the Author:

Alasdair Gray won the the Whitbread and Guardian Awards for POOR THINGS. He is also the author of THE BOOK OF PREFACES, the story-collection, TEN TALES TALL AND TRUE, and the groundbreaking modern classic, LANARK.

About this edition

• Publisher: Thomson Learning
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0156000687
• ISBN 13: 9780156000680
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 317