Sputnik Caledonia

Sputnik Caledonia (2008) is a novel by British writer Andrew Crumey which 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.