Poor Things

What Poor Things is about

In late Victorian Glasgow, a young medical student named Archibald McCandless falls in with the eccentric surgeon Godwin Baxter. Baxter keeps a beautiful, childlike woman in his care. Her name is Bella, and she is said to have been made by implanting a baby's brain into the body of a drowned pregnant woman. When Bella sets off across Europe and the Middle East with the lawyer Duncan Wedderburn, her fresh, unguarded view of the world becomes a way to poke at marriage, class, and the rules society sets for women.

Alasdair Gray's postmodern retelling of Frankenstein won the Whitbread Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize. It is playful and darkly comic, and it arrives wrapped in letters, his own illustrations, an introduction, and critical notes, so the question of whose story you are reading stays gloriously open.

Questions about Poor Things

When was Poor Things published?

Poor Things by Alasdair Gray was first published in 1992.

Was Poor Things one of the best books of 1992?

Poor Things is #16 on BookWard's Best Books of 1992, out of 43 1992 books that cleared our data bar. 228 readers have shelved it on Open Library.

Why is Poor Things on the Best Books of 1992 list?

228 readers have shelved it on Open Library.

More of the best books of 1992

• Welcome to Dead House Robert Lawrence Stine, #1
• The Secret History Donna Tartt, #2
• The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes Bill Watterson, #3
• Snow Crash Neal Stephenson, #4
• The Shadow Rising Robert Jordan, #5
• The Artist's Way Julia Cameron, #6

See the full Best Books of 1992, the Top 100, or new books on Rising.