The full title of this work, Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D. Scottish Public Health Officer, reflect a bit of wacky genius at work here. Someone named Alasdair Gray has found a memoir supposedly of a 19th-century public health officer in Glasgow. The truth of the memoir is suspect, nevertheless Gray manages to change it and then lose it. And that's just the backdrop. Inside the memoir is the story of McCandless, an acquaintance named Godwyn Bysshe Baxter who takes a suicide victim, gives her the brain of her unborn child to create a promiscuous and brutal girlfriend. The book, which won the 1992 Guardian Fiction Prize, takes off from there.

From Publishers Weekly
Winner of the 1992 Whitbread Prize, Scottish writer Gray's ( Something Leather ) black comedy uses a science-fiction-like premise to satirize Victorian morals. Ostensibly the memoirs of late-19th-century Glasgow physician Archibald McCandless, the narrative follows the bizarre life of oversexed, volatile Bella Baxter, an emancipated woman and a female Frankenstein. Bella is not her real name; as Victorian Blessington, she drowned herself to escape her abusive husband, but a surgeon removed the brain from the fetus she was carrying and placed it in her skull, resucitating her. The revived Bella has the mental age of a child. Engaged to marry McCandless, she chloroforms him and runs off with a shady lawyer who takes her on a whirlwind adventure, hopping from Alexandria to Odessa to a Parisian brothel. As her brain matures, Bella develops a social conscience, but her rescheduled nuptials to Archie are cut short when she is recognized as Victoria by her lawful husband, Gen. Sir Aubrey Blessington. In an epilogue dated 1914, cranky idealist Victoria McCandless, M.D., a suffragette, Fabian socialist, pacifist and advocate of birthing stools, pokes holes in her late husband Archie's narrative. Illustrated with Gray's suitably macabre drawings, this work of inspired lunacy effectively skewers class snobbery, British imperialism, prudishness and the tenets of received wisdom. Author tour. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Geoff Ryman
Witty and delightfully written. . . . Attention to Victorian Glasgow with its civic fountains, domestic interiors and medical schools gives the book texture. It is the characters, and strangely enough its phantasmagoria, that give it life.

Publisher Weekly
"This work of inspired lunacy effectively skewers class snobbery, British imperialism, prudishness and the tenets of received wisdom."

Geoff Ryman, New York Times
"Witty and delightfully written."

Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times
"Probably a crank, possibly a genius, certainly an original and independent voice. . . ."

Anthony Burgess
"The greatest Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott."

Book Description
POOR THINGS revises the story of FRANKENSTEIN by replacing the traditional "monster" with Bella Baxter--a young erotomaniac brought back to life with the brain of a child. Satirizing the classic Victorian novel, POOR THINGS is a hilarious political allegory and a thought-provoking contrast between the ambition of men and the knowledge of women.

About the Author
Considered to be one of the greatest contemporary Scottish novelists, Alasdair Gray is the author of over a dozen novels and short story collections, including LANARK, 1982 JANINE, and UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY. Recently, he published THE BOOK OF PREFACES, a collection and study of prefaces from 675 A.D. to 1920. He currently lives in Glasgow.

FROM THE PUBLISHER