Lanark

For the first time in Russian - one of the main British books of the 20th century, a debut novel written over 30 years and introducing the world to a new master of the first magnitude. 'Lanark' is simultaneously a novel of education and an adventurous Chronicle, a mystical phantasmagoria and a book about first love; something similar could have been produced by Joyce, Kafka and Edgar Poe if the three of them had sat down to write the script for 'Pinocchio' for Walt Disney - in Glasgow, armed with a case of Scotch whiskey. Here, a student dropout gets a commission to paint a cathedral, people in the afterlife are covered in crocodile skin, and government officials take the Exam for the slow Murder of Hope. Alasdair Gray is a Scot. That explains a lot.