1982, Janine

An unforgettably challenging book about power and powerlessness, men and women, masters and servants, small countries and big countries, Alasdair Gray's exploration of the politics of pornography has lost none of its power to shock. 1982, Janine is a searing portrait of male need and inadequacy, as explored via the lonely sexual fantasies of Jock McLeish, failed husband, lover and business man. Yet there is hope here, too, and the humour, imaginative and textual energy of the narrative achieves its own kind of redemption in the end.

Alasdair Gray is the author of The Book of Prefaces, the dystopian classic Lanark, Old Men in Love, and Poor Things, for which he won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize.