Alasdair Gray

What strange secret made rich, beautiful, tempestuous Bella Baxter irresistible to the poor Scottish medical student Archie McCandless? Was it her mysterious origin in the home of his monstrous friend Godwin Baxter, the genius whose voice could perforate eardrums? This story of true love and scientific daring whirls the reader from the private operating-theatres of late-Victorian Glasgow through aristocratic casinos, low-life Alexandria and a Parisian bordello, reaching an interrupted climax in a Scottish church.

Poor Things

Grace Frost

"Small, awkward McCandless fell as passionately in love with God as I had done. He loved me too, of course, but only because he saw me as God's female part - the part he could embrace and enter. But God was the first great love of his life, and the love was not returned."

"You, dear reader, have now two accounts to choose between and there can be no doubt which is most probable. My second husband's story positively stinks of all that was morbid in that most morbid of centuries, the nineteenth."

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