POOR THINGS
In the 1880s in Glasgow, Scotland, medical student Archibald McCandless finds himself enchanted with the intriguing creature known as Bella Baxter. Supposedly the product of the fiendish scientist Godwin Baxter, Bella was resurrected for the sole purpose of fulfilling the whims of her benefactor. As his desire turns to obsession, Archibald’s motives to free Bella are revealed to be as selfish as Godwin’s, who claims her body and soul.
But Bella has her own passions to pursue. Passions that take her to aristocratic casinos, low-life Alexandria, and a Parisian bordello, reaching an interrupted climax in a Scottish church.
In the 1880s in Glasgow, Scotland, medical student Archibald McCandless finds himself enchanted with the intriguing creature known as Bella Baxter. Supposedly the product of the fiendish scientist Godwin Baxter, Bella was resurrected for the sole purpose of fulfilling the whims of her benefactor. As his desire turns to obsession, Archibald’s motives to free Bella are revealed to be as selfish as Godwin’s, who claims her body and soul.
But Bella has her own passions to pursue. Passions that take her to aristocratic casinos, low-life Alexandria, and a Parisian bordello, reaching an interrupted climax in a Scottish church. Exploring her station as a woman in the shadow of the patriarchy, Bella knows it is up to her to free herself–and to decide what meaning, if any, true love has in her life.
- Mariner Books
- Paperback
- October 2023
- 336 Pages
- 9780063374683
Buy the Book
$18.99
About Alasdair Gray
Alasdair Gray (1934-2019) was a Scottish novelist, playwright, and artist and is regarded as the father figure of the Scottish Renaissance. As a post-modernist, Gray’s written works combine elements of realism, fantasy and science fiction supported by his own illustrations and typography. His books have been published internationally and translated into Italian, Russian, and Japanese. His awards include the Whitbread Fiction Prize, Guardian Fiction Prize, and Saltire Society Life Time Achievement Award.
Praise
“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.” — Los Angeles Book Review
“This work of inspired lunacy effectively skewers class snobbery, British imperialism, prudishness and the tenets of received wisdom.” — Publishers Weekly
“A riotously comic, up-to-date Victorian romance . . . deft and frolicsome.” — Boston Globe
“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.” — Washington Post Book World
“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?” — Chicago Tribune
“Witty and delightfully written.” — New York Times
“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 (London)
‘A magnificently brisk, funny, dirty, brainy book’ — London Review of Books
“Visionary, ornate and outrageous.” — The Independent