Alasdair Gray [Hardcover]

'A story finely told ... Glass has produced a portrait that is critically intimate to the point of being genuinely, unashamedly loving' Prospect 'Alasdair Gray is spectacularly eccentric ... [This book] will ... delight the many devotees of the Gray cult' Financial Times 'A strange and nourishing stew' Time 'Honest and revealing, tender and, very unacademically, moving' The Herald --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Glass plays Boswell to Gray's Johnson in this first (and very likely last), imaginative yet rigorous biography of Scotland's greatest living novelist. 'Alasdair Gray was not always the rapidly ageing, fat Glasgow pedestrian he likes to describe on the inside leaf of his books. There was once a time when he was young. A time when he was really rather thin. Many years when he went unpublished and unrecognised. This book aims to document, as faithfully as possible, that journey from son of a box-maker, encouraged to paint, write and do whatever made him feel good, to septuagenarian 'little grey deity' (as Will Self has called him). For the first time in his life, Alasdair claims to be completely satisfied and well-paid (he lived in debt until 1990), and now lives a settled, happy day-to-day existence with Morag, painting his mural at the Oran Mor arts centre five minutes walk from his home most days, while (at the time of writing) taking occasional periods off for writing several books. Aside from work, Gray's pleasures include daytime whisky, giving money away, reading books by people he doesn't have to meet and 'having my way'. This book will look in depth at the people, events, books, paintings, plays, poems and circumstances that conspired to make the man as he is today.' RODGE GLASS

Suiting form to subject, Rodge Glass has brought the inventive techniques of Gray's fiction to bear on the biographer's role. Mixing a chronological narrative of his subject's life (at the rate of one chapter per decade) with his own diaries of meeting, getting to know and working with the artist, writer and campaigner, narrative and diaries eventually dovetail in a riotous final chapter on the publication of Alasdair Gray's latest novel, Old Men in Love, in October 2007.

Rodge Glass is now a novelist (No Fireworks and Hope for Newborns, Faber, 2005 and 2008), but wasn't when he first encountered Gray in a Glasgow pub in 1998. Since then, while pursuing his own writing ambitions, he has filled many roles in the life of the writer/artist. He has taken dictation whenever and wherever asked: whether Gray is in bed, in hospital or drinking soup cold from the can, he is there with a pad or a laptop, awaiting instructions. He has been barman, tutee, secretary, signature forger, driver, researcher, advisor, chief technology negotiator, tea-maker and paper boy, with varying degrees of success. In this book Glass attempts one more role - biographer. Born in Manchester, he lives in Glasgow.