What they said about Lanark …

“Scotland produced, in Hugh MacDiarmid, the greatest poet of the century (or so some believe); it was time Scotland produced a shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom. This is it.”

Anthony Burgess, 1984

“Just as Joyce fitted an ordinary day in Dublin into the armature of the Odyssey, so Gray reconfigures the life of Duncan Thaw into a polyphonic Divina Commedia of Scotland. The Joyce comparison is valid on many levels and I think provides an insight into Gray’s approach and methodology as a novelist.”

William Boyd, 2011

“It is a quirky, crypto-Calvinist Divine Comedy, often harsh but never mean, always honest but not always wise. Certainly it should be widely read; it should be given every chance to reach those readers – for there will surely be some, and not all of them Scots – to whom it will be, for a short time or a lifetime, the one book they would not do without.”

John Crowley in the New York Times, 1985

“The fact that Lanark had come from Scotland was like a door opening. It was a shock. You just didn’t think that things like that could come from here, and the fact that this one had was dizzying.”

David Greig, 2015

“Gray spoke using the words, syntax and places of home, yet he did it without the tang of apology or rudemechanical humour, the Brigadoon tartanry or long-dead warrior chieftain stuff I had grown used to thinking were the options for how my nation appeared in print. Neither had he chosen the heather-strewn hills, the dank glens, the isles or the fishing communities as his location. With its Royal Infirmary cupolas and Victorian Great Western road, its Blackhill kids and the Clyde widening out to the sea, the place in which this epic would reveal itself was Glasgow, a breathing, many-layered Glasgow.”

Janice Galloway, 2002

“For a while before I held a copy I imagined it like a large paper brick of 600 pages, well bound, a thousand of them to be spread through Britain. I felt that each copy was my true body with my soul inside, and that the animal my friends called Alasdair Gray was a no-longer essential form of after-birth. I enjoyed that sensation. It was a safe feeling.”