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Books
Kitchenly 434
2021
Kitchenly 434 is set in a sprawling Tudorbethan mansion in Sussex, Kitchenly Mill Race, on the cusp of the arrival of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister. In some ways, the last days of an Age of Innocence.
Marko Morrell, guitarist in Fear Taker, is one of the biggest rock stars in the world. His demanding lifestyle means he is frequently in absentia at Kitchenly, his idyllic country retreat, and so it is his butler (or ‘help’), Crofton Park, who is charged with the maintenance and housekeeping. When, one day, two young girls arrive looking for Marko clutching their copies of Fear Taker LPs, Crofton finds himself on a romantic misadventure which leads to the tragi-comic unravelling of the fantasies he has been living by.
A novel about delusional male behaviour, opening and closing curtains, self-awareness, loneliness and ‘getting it together in the country’, Kitchenly 434 is a magnificent novel about the Golden Age of Rock in the bucolic English countryside.
The Seal Club
2020
Available for purchase on the London Books website
The Seal Club is a three-novella collection by the authors Alan Warner, Irvine Welsh and John King, three stories that capture their ongoing interests and concerns, stories that reflect bodies of work that started with Morvern Callar, Trainspotting and The Football Factory – all best-sellers, all turned into high-profile films. This is maverick, outspoken fiction for the 2020s. It will make you think, and it will make you smile.
You can read an exclusive interview with Alan Warner, Irvine Welsh and John King about The Seal Club right here on The Common Breath website.
Good Listeners
2019
Available for purchase on The Common Breath website
These stories move from Mull's windswept beaches to the darkened backroom of a Glasgow strip club, from night-time on snow-covered slopes to the claustrophobia of a bizarre bus journey, but what develops through the differences in setting and style is a shared commitment to local culture and language, to warm humour, and most of all, to listening for the characters to emerge and express themselves within the text.
Their Lips Talk of Mischief
2014
High up in the Conrad Flats that loom bleakly over Acton, two future stars of the literary scene - or so they assume - are hard at work, tapping out words of wit and brilliance between ill-paid jobs writing captions for the Cat Calendar 1985 and blurbs for trashy novels with titles like Brothel of the Vampire. Just twenty-one but already well entrenched in a life eked out on dole payments, pints and dollops of porridge and pasta, Llewellyn and Cunningham don't have it too bad: a pub on the corner, a misdirected parental allowance, and the delightful company of Aoife, Llewellyn's model fiancée, mother of his young baby - and the woman of Cunningham's increasingly vivid dreams.
Praise for the novel:
"Glitteringly explosive ... the perfect summer read." (The Times)
"[T]his craftily engineered and winningly nostalgic novel is at last a story of lost illusions. It ends in a flash-frame of aporia, an impossible decision to be made: in lesser hands this might feel like a copout, but Warner knows exactly what he is doing." (Guardian)
"Warner has always been the contemporary Scottish writer most interested in literary style; combining slangy, stylised speech with a baroque phrasing and syntax, he is incapable of writing a dull book." (The List)
"Moving, funny, richly peopled and written with great gusto." (Financial Times)
"One of Scotland's best, a writer who has begun to create his own, often surreal, imaginative world out of the flotsam and jetsam - the detritus - of modern life." (Observer)
"An ebullient but underlyingly sombre book." (Sunday Times)
"Their Lips Talk of Mischief paints a sharp picture of deception, obsession and love. It encourages runaways to look forwards rather than backwards, yet never discloses its journey's end. It shows Warner at his finest, all his talents in cahoots." (Scotland on Sunday)
"Their Lips Talk of Mischief is that rare thing - a book about books that will actually appeal to those without literary doctorates ... this is a novel that rises above its meta self-reflexiveness to cover frustrated ambition, friendship, desire, love - and a good deal of sex ... Warner has a peculiar eye for detail that is delightful and disturbing." (We Love This Book)
The Deadman's Pedal
2012
Winner of the James Tait Black Prize
For 16-year-old Simon Crimmons there is not a lot to do. Going nowhere, fed up with school, he leaves to work as a driver on the trains. That summer he is introduced to a world of grown-up glamour, strikes and girlfriends. When Simon falls for the ethereal, aristocratic Varie, he finds freedom and adventure but will it be at a price? Too ‘posh’ for the railways, too ‘working class’ for Varie, Simon must navigate what it means to be a man as his world is turned upside down.
Praise for the novel:
"A delight: a boisterous, kindly, deep, sweet romp of a thing" (Scotsman)
"Absolutely beautiful... As far as I'm concerned he's emerging as the William Faulkner of British fiction: somebody who's created a body of work that has not only animated a language but a period and a place... He has this incredible talent" (Andrew O'Hagan)
"This is the best Scottish fiction since Lanark" (Scottish Review of Books)
"Morally sensitive, exquisitely written and emotionally mature" (Guardian)
"If you still haven’t read it from last year, Alan Warner’s The Deadman’s Pedal was out in paperback in this. Read it." (Janice Galloway, Scotsman)
The Stars in the Bright Sky
2010
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize
The Sopranos are back: out of school and out in the world, gathered in Gatwick to plan a super-cheap last-minute holiday reunion. Kay, Kylah, Manda, Rachel and Finn are joined by Finn's equally gorgeous friend Ava and are ready to go on the rampage - Longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.
Praise for the novel:
"Memorably bittersweet... [with] brilliantly pitched dialogue and monologue. The final cataclysmic scene is masterly" (Guardian)
"The way that this middle-aged man manages to inhabit a gang of girls with such gusto and conviction is one of the small miracles of contemporary fiction, and Warner has done it once again" (The Sunday Times)
"This is a snarly group picaresque, a black comedy in which Gatwick airport is like Kafka's Castle in reverse... stifling, hilarious and indelible" (Scottish Review of Books)
"Warner navigates the comic, the philosophical and the socially acute like no other writer we have" (Independent)
"Vigorous and uncannily convincing... Readers would be sorry if Warner were to have finished with these characters" (Daily Telegraph)
The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven
2006
Manolo Follano is handsome, fastidious, opinionated, more than a little vain and has built a comfortable provincial life for himself. Despite his inability to master the English language, his architectural design company on the mediterranean coast is thriving, his suits are handsome and his luxury appartment complete. So when his doctor and best friend tells 'Lolo' he is dangerously ill it is, it would seem, the end of everything.
Praise for the novel:
"In '03 Alan Warner was one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists, quite right too - a writer of stunning originality" (The Times)
"The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven is one man's story, funny, moving, swollen with lust and high anxities, sombre in moments, momentously memorable in passages of lyrical intensity, where it sings with a potent underlying sadness" (Scotsman)
"Funny, profound, shocking and provocative" (Esquire)
"An extraordinary novel... contains beautiful writing...[and] moments of superb deadpan comedy" (Guardian)
"A triumph of blackly comic modern gothic... Warner's a brilliant writer and his wild imagination is captured in prose of demented lyricism" (Spectator)
"A savage, surreal and very original imagination" (Sunday Telegraph)
The Man Who Walks
2002
After the scandalous theft of of £27,000 from a local pub, a homeless drifter pursues his eccentric uncle, 'The Man Who Walks', up into the Highlands to recover the money. The nephew's frantic, stalled progress and other bizarre diversions form this wickedly hilarious novel.
Praise for the novel:
"A brilliant road movie (on foot) of a book" (Irvine Welsh)
"The Man's a genius - one of the most influential literary mould-breakers ever" (Time Out)
"Nobody takes literary and inventive risks that pay off quite like Warner's do... The book is an immense pleasure" (Guardian)
"Warner is unique and treasurable" (Daily Telegraph)
"A triumph of blackly comic modern gothic... Warner's a brilliant writer and his wild imagination is captured in prose of demented lyricism" (Big Issue)
The Sopranos, or Our Ladies
1998
The choir from Our Lady of Perpetual Succour School for Girls is being bussed to the national finals in the big, big city. And it's an important day for The Sopranos - Orla, Kylah, (Ra)Chell, Manda and Fionnula (the Cooler) - pub-crawling, shoplifting and body-piercing being the top priorities. Then it's time to lose that competition - lose, because a nuclear sub has just anchored in the bay and, tonight, the Man Trap disco will be full of submariners on shore-leave.
Praise for the novel:
"In a spill of vivid and corruscating language... Alan Warner has emerged as a writer of great inventiveness" (Annie Proulx)
"Wonderful... humane, unique, a page-turner with a neat series of bombshells at the end" (Daily Telegraph)
"Warner provides every nuance of the characters in a sustained tour de force... This is the most profound of Warner's books. His sense of place and atmosphere remains extraordinarily intense" (Guardian)
"Wickedly funny... Warner can combine literary style with go-anywhere demotic humour... Like St Trinians with condoms and male nudity" (Independent)
"Compassionate and rioutously funny. It is a long time since I read a novel which had me rocking with laughter" (The Times)
These Demented Lands
1997
Winner of the Encore Award
A sequel to his acclaimed début Morvern Callar, These Demented Lands, confirms that Alan Warner boasts an extravagant talent... This novel is set on a Scottish island that contains a variety of weird landmarks and an hallucinogenic cast of characters - including a DJ who wants to set up the rave to end all raves, a visitor whose job is to assess candidates for sainthood and the wonderfully unfazed heroine, Morvern Callar.
Praise for the novel:
"Warner's second novel is a classic like his first one... glorious... powerful" (Independent)
"A moving evocation of post- apocalyptic rave culture in the West Highlands of contemporary Scotland" (Independent on Sunday)
"Prodigious powers of invention... marvellously dynamic prose... brilliant visual imagination... A greatly ambitious novel" (Times Literary Supplement)
"Think of the inventiveness of Iain Banks filtered through the lurid lens of a David Lynch, with a soundtrack from Verve and Bob Dylan... These Demented Lands is fiction 'on the Outer Rim of everything'. Rave on, child" (Scotsman)
"With a style that fuses poetic discipline with the riff-based scat of a hedonis" (Esquire)
"Alan Warner has a gift greater than the gift of telling a story. He can make what he chooses to tell us seem like a story we were waiting to hear" (Observer)
Morven Callar
1995
Winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize
It is off-season in a remote Highland sea port: twenty-one-year-old Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket, wakes one morning to find her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on their kitchen floor. Morvern's laconic reaction is both intriguing and immoral. What she does next is even more appalling... Brutal, erotic, jarringly poetic and rich in a blood-dark humour, Morvern Callar was the spectacular debut of an utterly original Scottish writer and winner of the Somerset Maugham Award.
Praise for the novel:
"Warner's portrait of a Scottish rave-girl is bleak, haunting and brilliantly original" (Nick Hornby)
"Morvern is a compelling creation; elusive, enigmatic and opaque. Both ordinary and extraordinary, she gleams out like onyx from a vivid, macabre and lyrical book" (The Guardian)
"Not since Camus' The Outsider has a voice with so many angles hopped and fluttered from the pages, has a note risen to chill in its opening breath" (Scotland on Sunday)
"Morvern is a brilliant creation... more than a stunning debut novel; to my mind it establishes Alan Warner as one of the most talented, original and interesting voices around" (Irvine Welsh)
"Brilliant, tender, a stylistic dazzler" (Hilary Mantel)