Sputnik Caledonia (2008) is a novel by Andrew Crumey, for which he won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award, the UK's largest literary prize at the time.It depicts a Scottish boy who longs to be a spaceman, is transported to a parallel communist Scotland where he takes part in a space mission to a black hole, and returns to the real world in middle age, possibly as a ghost. The novel is in three “Books”, with the central one (set in the alternate world) being longest, predominantly serious in tone, while the outer sections are shorter and more humorous. The title refers to the Russian Sputnik program and the alternative name for Scotland, Caledonia, suggesting the idea of Scotland as a satellite state of the Soviet Union. The book was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, losing to Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture. The other shortlisted authors were Mohammed Hanif, Adam Mars-Jones and Toni Morrison. It was also shortlisted in the fiction category of the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards, losing to James Kelman's Kieron Smith, Boy.Jonathan Coe called Sputnik Caledonia "the most impressive achievement yet from a still undervalued writer: in its combination of dystopian science fiction with warm but unsentimental childhood memoir, it struck me as being firmly in the tradition of - and worthy of comparison with - Alasdair Gray's Lanark."In The Scotsman David Stenhouse wrote that Sputnik Caledonia was one of "very few" Scottish literary works that "actually does come close to 'envisioning' an alternative version of Scottish statehood".Ken MacLeod called it a "very fine novel", adding "it looks like SF. But it can't be read as SF... In Sputnik Caledonia, the parallel world is a metaphor of what is lost in every choice. That's why the book is literary fiction and not SF, and is all the better for it." Source: Wikipedia (en)