"Beautiful, inventive, ambitious and nuts."--The Times (London)
"Our nearest contemporary equivalent to Blake, our sweetest-natured
screwed-up visionary."--London Evening Standard
Alasdair Gray's unique melding of humor and metafiction at once hearken
back to Laurence Sterne and sit beside today's literary mash-ups with
equal comfort. Old Men in Love is smart, down-to-earth, funny, bawdy,
politically inspired, dark, multi-layered, and filled with the kind of
intertextual play that Gray delights in.
As with Gray's previous novel Poor Things, several partial narratives
are presented together. Here the conceit is that they were all
discovered in the papers of the late John Tunnock, a retired Glasgow
teacher who started a number of novels in settings as varied as
Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Victorian Somerset, and Britain
under New Labour.
This is the first US edition (updated with the author's corrections from
the UK edition) of a novel that British critics lauded as one of the
best of Gray's long career. Beautifully printed in two colors throughout
and featuring Gray's trademark strong design, Old Men in Love will
stand out from everything else on the shelf. Fifty percent is fact and
the rest is possible, but it must be read to be believed.
Alasdair Gray is one of Scotland's most well-known and acclaimed
artists. He is the author of nine novels, including Lanark, 1982
Janine, and the Whitbread and Guardian Prize-winning Poor Things, as
well as four collections of stories, two collections of poetry, and
three books of nonfiction, including The Book of Prefaces. He lives in
Glasgow, Scotland.
