An unusual perspective on Scotland: Alasdair Gray. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
Complex and artful, earthy and eccentric, Alasdair Gray's Lanark is a landmark of Scottish literature. So too, it turns out as he talks to John Mullan and other readers at the Guardian book club, is its author.
With characteristic wit, Gray explains how the book's blend of conventional realism with wild, experimental speculation was fuelled by his distaste for reality, and informed by the death-haunted fables of Hans Christian Andersen.
He supplies answers to many of the book's other mysteries - such as the "utter cheek" and attention-seeking which drove him to reorganise the sequence of the novel's component books.
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