Old Men in Love (John Tunnock's Posthumous Papers)

“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.