In A History Maker (Canongate Pounds 13.99) Gray disputes the allegedly sempiternal selfishness of human nature, seized upon as a proven truth in the wake of the soviet power block’s recent dissolution, and takes the resulting proclamation of all history’s end and any Utopia’s workability as a pair of premises to be demolished. He plants seeds of discontent from the outset in his brave new world of 2220 and surprises the reader with the possibility that a society based on justice, common ownership and food for all might well be equipped to survive the threat of all the old divisions and in the process cure itself of its sillier interim solutions.

Of course this is also a satire on Utopian fictions, which, while conjuring perfect worlds tend to turn them into visions of utter tedium, with the door firmly closed on history. Gray’s Scottish border fantasy jokes at its own expense all the better to examine the inherent flaws in a future that might work. His “housekeeping” women are at first alarmingly reminiscent of the pre-Raphaelite Stepford Wives in William Morris’s News from Nowhere, but this picture of feminine conformity is immediately undercut by a more lively set of options. Restless minds and restless bodies, dissidence and nomads are all allowed scope, but there still have to be a few trouble makers craving more excitement than a world virtually free of conflict can offer, and the novel would be no fun without them; and it is very entertaining indeed.

Like News from Nowhere though, this Utopia is unappealingly bereft of cities and its creator has rid the Scottish setting of all but the old Scottish stock, with no explanation for the whereabouts of the Irish and Italians, Poles, Jews and Asians who have boosted 20th century Scotland’s urban population. But the joke stretches from tidy Utopias to the idea of Scottishness itself, both ironically and reverently, with ample reference to Scotland’s rich cultural traditions. The latter form a part of the book’s most serious portion of wit, the pseudo footnotes which constitute a set of much-needed history lessons at a time when history is being seen as a thing of the past.

Jose Saramago shares Alisdair Gray’s unfashionable faith in humanity’s potential for change. Like Gray too, Saramago, one of Portugal’s foremost writers, approaches fiction as an adventure into ideas about national identity, as well as all the other big ideas that have long preoccupied European fiction. The Stone Raft (Collins Harvill Pounds 8.99 translated by Giovanni Pontiero) is a surreal metaphysical fable of great tenderness and meandering charm. In it the Iberian peninsular is inexplicably severed from Europe and drifts off into the Atlantic. As it travels West its population too is all at sea, suddenly uprooted in search of shelter, food and safety from impending collision.

The novel follows a small band of strangers who come together through the different marvels they have experienced as the catastrophe occurred. What they find is close friendship, passionate love and the urge to wander for as long as the earth beneath their feet continues on the move. A mysterious dog is their guide, a Deux Chevaux is abandoned for a covered wagon and two literal horses. They discover new things in themselves and history all around them as they imperceptably enter the realms of Don Quixote or embark on the ancient pilgrimage to Santiago in reverse direction. As one character observes there are a lot of answers waiting for questions and Saramago’s writing is good at reminding us of this.

Gagarin amp; I (Chatto and Windus Pounds 9.99) is a very English novel set in those distant days when the sixties were still the fifties; parts of it made me think of Beryl Bainbridge. But Stephen Blanchard is an original. His narrative is eventful but desultory, unfolding through the quizzical sideways perceptions of 14-year-old Leonard, whose mother and aunt run a lodging house in a northern town.

Leonard is a bright lad and a prodigious reader, who suffers from a rare wasting disease. He hero worships the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and dreams of the Russians reaching the moon. The pacing is faultless, the dialogue full of the unspoken or the painfully concealed. Death makes an early entrance and stays on in resonance.