It wasn't much of a commercial hit, but I was amazed at the amount of heartfelt responses from young readers, whose taste for tragedy, it turned out, was at least equal to their need for the more conventional, optimistic "heartening" narratives.
I realise how much I rely on external narratives to get me through the day – work, novels, films, gossip, Twitter, news, whatever.
Reading this has made me realise that some of the most powerful narratives in contemporary fiction have been written by young, highly educated female African writers, who are tired of the old clichés frequently bandied around about Africa.
She quotes Oscar Wilde – "The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it" – and, she adds, "He really was the person in a position to say that – he knew that history had to be remade, because only certain narratives deliver themselves as acceptable, dominant narratives".
These fragments of rock that have tumbled from the sky often seem like the only solid element in the earthly narratives they leave like twisting trails of light in their wake.
Harvest, his latest novel, dramatises one of the great under-told narratives of English history: the forced enclosure of open fields and common land from the late medieval era on, whereby subsistence agriculture was replaced by profitable wool production and the peasant farmers dispossessed and displaced.
Everything is brought into question in Book Four as Lanark travels back to Unthank through a land in a state of decay and disintegration, has encounters with his own author, it told that he exists only in print anyway and there's little he can do to stop the apocalypse … The Bridge too has connected narratives – but this time there are three rather than two.
"As both our islands enter periods of important centenaries we can and must reflect on the ethical importance of respecting different but deeply interwoven narratives.
Too many of us seem far too fond of narratives of our powerlessness, maybe because powerlessness lets us off the hook.
These women, none of them over 25, have taken the narratives set out by suited officials and journalists and flipped them upside down.
And if all that sounds confusing, both writers also share an ability to make their complicated and philosophically challenging narratives easy and enjoyable to follow.
