Glasgow has a rich literary tradition — it is one of the most written-about cities in Britain, with a particular fondness for crime fiction and working-class realism.
Alasdair Gray, Lanark (1981). The essential Glasgow novel, written over thirty years and mixing grim realist fiction about a Glasgow art student with a surrealist nightmare of bureaucratic dystopia. It is difficult and long and extraordinary. Begin here.
William McIlvanney, Laidlaw (1977). The first of McIlvanney's Glasgow detective novels featuring Jack Laidlaw, a philosophical cop navigating the city's criminal underworld. McIlvanney invented Tartan Noir and set the template for every Scottish crime novel that followed.
Denise Mina, Garnethill (1998). Mina's debut, set in the hill neighbourhood above Sauchiehall Street, follows a psychiatric patient who discovers a murder in her flat. Ferociously plotted, psychologically precise, and absolutely rooted in Glasgow's geography.
Peter Capaldi (director), Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life — not a book, but for a sense of the Glasgow artistic milieu, this Oscar-winning short film captures the absurdist wit the city's creative community runs on.
Andrew O'Hagan, Our Fathers (1999). A novel about three generations of a Scottish family set against the decline of the post-war housing estates — the tower blocks that defined Glasgow's ambitions and broke them. Clear-eyed and elegiac.