LANARK: A LIFE IN 4 BOOKS

New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1985. First U.S. hardcover edition. A fine copy in fine dust jacket. (#168845) (29631). Octavo, boards. The first U.S. edition was published by Lippincott & Crowell in trade paperback format only in February 1981, the same month as the Scottish edition published by Canongate. Braziller's edition was printed in the UK from the plates of the Canongate edition. The author's first book (first published by Canongate in 1981) and a major twentieth-century fantasy. Bizarre after death fantasy in which the protagonist is transported to the regimented underground dystopia Unthank, a kind of lightless Limbo where people die of "metaphorical diseases including one known as dragonhide, which leads to explosive disintegration through excess of bottled-up internal heat or emotion, and others whose victims' remains are exploited by the state for munitions and food." - John Clute, SFE (online). "A big and original novel ... a shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom." - Burgess, Ninety-nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939, p. 126. Anatomy of Wonder (2004) II-460. Barron (ed), Fantasy Literature 4A-121. Pringle, Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels 77. Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985, p. 406.