Alan Warner is going home. The decision has been made, houses have been looked at, and later this year, he and

his half-Irish, half-Spanish wife, Holly, will decamp from Edinburgh to Oban.

In truth it's a homecoming more in

body than spirit, for in his imagination, Warner has never left the west coast

of Scotland.

One of the brightest stars of the current wave of new Scottish writers, Warner has already charted the landscapes of his childhood and teenage years in his first two novels. An (unnamed) Oban was the setting for much of his opening gambit, Morvern Callar, which rapidly became cult reading among the Trainspotting set, while the island of Mull provided the backdrop to a sequel of sorts, the bizarre These Demented Lands.

The importance of that familiar landscape, often overlooked by critics eager to tie Warner into a highly notional idea of a young ScotLit set based on Glasgow and Edinburgh, is brought home powerfully in Warner's latest novel, The Sopranos, a book which his publishers firmly expect to propel him into the

literary mainstream.

The Sopranos tells the tale of a trip to the capital by a choir of Catholic schoolgirls from Oban, who are more concerned about loading up on Hooch and new clothes than the outcome of the choir competition which forms the ostensible reason behind their journey. In a telling moment, two of the main characters, Fionnula and Kay, wander lost around some of Edinburgh's scuz-zier locales, ending up at a roundabout which is ''possibly one of the ugliest places in the land''.

It's a location that inevitably prompts thoughts of home for the girls, where even the council houses at least offer ''the saving grace of the skies where clouds would always move faster than anywhere these girls would ever travel to and where the dying light of day would falter in the slow-moving coal-fire smoke above, where owls and foxes moved in the grey-black woods of the sheltering hills, hundreds of feet above the bus stops.''

At such moments, it's possible to see Warner not as the rave generation novelist he was tagged as after Morvern Callar, but a poet of place, making good his promise to put landscapes back into the novel.

Perhaps Warner's literary dedication to home territory arises out of the feelings of cultural inadequacy he experienced during his teenage years. He once described himself as part of the ''white trash of the Highlands'', a people with no indigenous culture other than what they lift from TV and music.

That perception lasted well into adulthood and sparked his decision to chuck the manuscript for Morvern Callar into a drawer when it was finished, as he reasoned no literature ever came from somewhere like Oban.

Warner was born in 1964. His mother and father, who had met during the war, lived on Mull and ran a hotel on the mainland. At 16, Warner left school to work on the railways. Night school led on to a Humanities course in London. He spent three years in the capital feeling ''pathologically homesick''. A year in Glasgow followed, after he won a bursary to study post-grad film, and then he left for Spain and two years working in cafes and bars at the height of the rave scene - an experience he revisited for his first novel.

When he moved to Edinburgh in 1990, the only job he could find was back on the railways. He had always tinkered with writing, but Morvern Callar finally began to take shape in the early 1990s. Warner would call in sick to work and spend the day typing, using milk of magnesia instead of Tippex.

Kevin Williamson, editor of the seminal literary magazine, Rebel Inc., recalls Warner sending him short stories and poems, using the pen name Morvern Callar at around this time, but it was only when he discovered fellow northerner Duncan MacLean's book of short stories, Bucket of Tongues, that Warner claims he realised his writing about the west coast of Scotland could be valid. Warner sent the Morvern Callar manuscript off to MacLean, who phoned him back in the middle of the night, raving about it and plying him with a list of London publishers.

Cape snapped up the rights and published it to immediate commercial and critical success, with the book winning the Somerset Maugham prize. Warner's editor at Cape, Robin Robertson, believes the novel more than deserved the acclaim.

''It's everything people say it is,'' he says. ''It's an extraordinary first novel, rich in ambition, scope, and confidence.''

The story of a young shop girl who is freed from material want after the suicide of her older boyfriend, Morvern Callar was seized upon by a style press eager to champion a new Irvine Welsh and thrilled to discover a writer who seemed to be clued up on the rave scene. Suddenly, Warner discovered to his chagrin, he was a rave novelist. ''I couldn't believe people picking up on that eight years after it had happened. If you actually analyse it there must be eight or nine pages in that book about rave activities. It became some kind of testimony to the rave generation, but in a way it was more of a supermarket novel than a rave one. It was about young working-class people escaping dead-end jobs.''

Warner was equally amazed by the book's success. He had regarded himself (with more than a touch of romanticism, one suspects), as an ''avant garde'' novelist whose work would only be rediscovered after his death. Now he was faced with writing a follow-up to a cult novel.

The result was These Demented Lands (1997), a much stranger novel that, though not without its admirers - it picked up the Encore prize - is much harder to like than its predecessor.

Talking to the Sunday Times at the time of publication, Warner claimed he didn't much care for it and would rather the publisher had waited another year. Kevin Williamson recalls some of the pressure Warner was under to finish the book.

''I think the publishers did push him too hard on that book. I was with him when he was finishing off the last pages. We were in a hotel in San Francisco and he was supposed to finish this book off in between drinking sessions - and I don't think that's the way you should finish a book, with publishers shouting they need it for tomorrow.''

Robin Robertson, recalling a weekend in which he and Warner worked on the proofs until 4am to meet the deadline, admits they could perhaps have done with a little more time, but does not remember any discussion about delaying publication.

''And if you are as prolific as Alan, it's just perverse not to take advantage of it, particularly at the beginning of a career, and at a time when people's memories are shorter and shorter.''

A year on, Warner dismisses the

Sunday Times story and now looks on the book, which he once described as an ''anti-novel'', with affection. ''I like that I've written a surreal book.''

Fearsomely widely-read, Warner likes to regard himself as an intellec-tual, though that has never stopped

him enjoying himself. According to MacLean: ''The style mags like to portray him as a champagne-quaffing Jack the Lad, but the side I know best is the one who can have an eloquent conversation on the narrative voice of Borges.'' Journalists constantly report boozy interview sessions. He recently told one of how he accidentally crawled through cow dung while trying to get to a rave near Hay-on-Wye, only to end up covering the walls of his hotel room in the stuff. He has, Robertson suggests, an enviable appetite for everything life can throw at him. Williamson is more succinct. ''He's a mad bastard. Full stop.''

The teenage protagonists of The Sopranos show a similar appetite for living, as they drink and joke and try to cop off with (mostly) the opposite sex. It's a riveting, life-affirming read, the film rights of which have already been scooped up for a cool #500,000 by Scottish film director Michael Caton Jones (Rob Roy, The Jackal).

Warner may well end up writing the script. He has already written four or five drafts for a long-mooted film version of Morvern Callar for the BBC. Lynne Ramsay, fresh from being named Palme d'Or runner-up for her short Gasman, will now helm the adaptation after

she has filmed her feature debut,

Rat Catcher.

The writer has also talked of writing a script based on the life of the young Orson Welles in Ireland and, more incongruously, has been linked with

a sequel to 1970s sci-fi movie,

Rollerball. But in the long run, he says, cinema is nothing more than a pleasant distraction. He is ambitious to carve out a lasting place for himself in the literary canon and do so by writing about Oban.

''I want to try to create a body of work that will hopefully be good enough to be considered the literature of that place. It's difficult to explain, but it's very important to me. I'd like to write one classic book set in Argyll.''

That classic could well be the already almost legendary The Outlying Station. Warner has been working on the novel - currently over 700 pages long - for eight years, almost as long as the timeframe of the book itself which charts 15 years of life in Oban during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Before that makes an appearance, Warner's next book should be The Oscillator, the story of a Spanish man suffering from HIV who begins to journey through Europe tracking down his former lovers, with his travels finishing in the Scottish Highlands. Whichever appears next, his track record suggests both will be worth waiting for.

''That's what I admire about him,'' Kevin Williamson concludes. ''He doesn't just want to be a good writer. I think he's really pushing himself. I think he will produce books that are of really lasting value, not just snapshots of the way we were in 1998.''

n The Sopranos is published by Cape at #9.99. It will be reviewed in detail by Alex Linklater in The

Herald next Thursday.

Teddy Jamieson