The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

This is the novel that James Robertson so skilfully pays homage to with The Testament of Gideon Mack, and it is equally as brilliant. Like The Testament, Confessions recounts a mere mortal's meeting with the devil and all its consequences, and despite being published in 1824 it teeters bizarrely on the edge of postmodernism. Hogg's dense, florid writing makes this a challenging read at times but it's worth sticking with, if only to marvel at the fact that such a book could have been written and published at the beginning of the 19th century.