This is my favourite book. It is the masterpiece of the late Scottish artist and writer Alasdair Gray, who also wrote Poor Things, which was excellently adapted by Yorgos Lanthimos into a movie last year.

Lanark is a vast, metatextual novel that defies easy categorisation. It’s structured in four parts, which are all presented to us in the wrong order. It has autobiographical and fantastical elements. It has illustrations (think early-modern engravings, think Dürer, Hobbes’ Leviathan , etc.). It’s full of allusions. It has unconventional footnotes. I’m long overdue for a rereading.

This is a novel about an artist. The protagonist is Duncan Thaw: a failed Glaswegian painter (a metaphor for Gray himself, though also seemingly in part based on William Blake). In the first two parts of the novel (which are, chronologically, the second and third books), we follow Thaw’s early life: his tumultuous childhood, his time at art school, and his final undoing which comes in the form of a mural of the Book of Genesis which he begins to paint in a small Protestant church in rural Scotland.

Thaw’s drive to create something transcendent is both noble and self-destructive. Gray’s depiction of the artist is brutally honest: showing how the desire to resist the expectations of society can ultimately turn into rage, loneliness, and self-erasure

Dr. Rebecca Marks • The Artist’s Way: 4 novels about creating