Poor Things

by Alasdair Gray Narrated by Russ Bain, Kathryn Drysdale

Overview

NOW A MAJOR FILM STARRRING EMMA STONE, FROM THE DIRECTOR OF THE FAVOURITE.

Winner of the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize

A life without freedom to choose is not worth having.

Godwin Baxter's scientific ambition to create the perfect companion is realized when he finds the drowned body of the beautiful Bella, who he brings back to life in a Frankenstein-esque feat. But his dream is thwarted by Dr. Archibald McCandless's jealous love for his creation...

But what does Bella think?

This story of true love and scientific daring whirls the reader from the private operating-theatres of late-Victorian Glasgow through aristocratic casinos, low-life Alexandria and a Parisian bordello, reaching an interrupted climax in a Scottish church.
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'A magnificently brisk, funny, dirty, brainy book' London Review of Books

'Visionary, ornate and outrageous' The Independent

'Witty and delightfully written' New York Times

'A brilliant marriage of technique, intelligence, and art.' Kirkus Reviews

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

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Witty and delightfully written.”—Geoff Ryman, New York Times

“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, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“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.”—Times Literary Supplement

The Boston Globe

A riotously comic, up-to-date Victorian romance . . . deft and frolicsome.

Spectator

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.

Washington Post Book World

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.”

Chicago Tribune

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?”

Barbara Hardy - Times Literary Supplement

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.”

Merle Rubin - Los Angeles Times Book Review

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.

Geoff Ryman - The New York Times

Witty and delightfully written.”

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159329387
Publisher:	W. F. Howes Ltd
Publication date:	10/26/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

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