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The Music of Time
"First published in a slight different form in Great Britain in 2019 by Profile Books Ltd."--Title page verso.
Learning to Sleep
Lucid, lyrical, and intellectually profound: this collection of poems resonates with life and death, but mostly what falls in between: the charmed darkness. Several ghosts haunt Learning to Sleep, from the author's mother, commemorated in an exquisitely charged variant on the pastoral elegy, to the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who wanders an implausible Lincolnshire landscape looking for some sign of belonging. Throughout the book, the powers and dominions of a lost pagan ancestry emerge unexpectedly through the gaps in contemporary life: half-seen and fleeting, but profoundly present. Behind it all, the figure of Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, marks Burnside's own attempts to come to terms with th...
John Burnside
Celebrated as a poet, novelist and non-fiction writer, and the winner of numerous major literary prizes including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, John Burnside is one of Britain's leading contemporary writers. John Burnside: Contemporary Critical Perspectives brings together leading scholars of contemporary literature to guide readers through the full range of the author's writings, from his fiction and poetry to his autobiographical and nature writing, exploring texts such as The Dumb House, The Light Trap, A Lie about My Father, Glister and Black Cat Bone. The book examines the major themes of Burnside's work, including the environment and the natural world, hauntings and dwelling, and his intertextual engagement with philosophy, music and the visual arts. Featuring a timeline of Burnside's life, an interview with the writer himself and a detailed list of further reading, this is the first authoritative guide to this major contemporary writer.
All One Breath
Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection ‘There are lines in All One Breath for instance, that brand themselves into your brain with the fire of painful recognition. And yet it is also part of his genius to be ever alert to beauty, too.’ - Sebastian Barry, a New Statesman Book of the Year In this absorbing, brilliant new collection – his first since Black Cat Bone – John Burnside examines our shared experience of this mortal world: how we are ‘all one breath’ and – with that breath – how we must strive towards the harmony of choir. Recognising that our attitudes to other creatures – human and non-human – cause too much damage and...
Black Cat Bone
Drawing on various sources, this book examines varieties of love, faith, hope and illusion, to suggest an unusual possibility: that when the search for what we expected to find - in the forest or in our own hearts - ends in failure, we can now begin the hard and disciplined quest for what is actually there.
A Summer of Drowning
‘Memorable, atmospheric and compelling’ Times Literary Supplement Liv lives with her mother on a remote island in the Arctic Circle. Her only friend is an old man who beguiles her with tales of trolls, mermaids, and the huldra, a wild spirit who appears as an irresistably beautiful girl, to tempt young men to danger and death. Then two boys drown within weeks of each other under mysterious circumstances, in the still, moonlit waters off the shores of Liv's home. Were the deaths accidental or were the boys lured to their doom by a malevolent spirit?
A Lie About My Father
A moving, unforgettable memoir of two lost men: a father and his child. He had his final heart attack in the Silver Band Club in Corby, somewhere between the bar and the cigarette machine. A foundling; a fantasist; a morose, threatening drinker who was quick with his hands, he hadn't seen his son for years. John Burnside's extraordinary story of this failed relationship is a beautifully written evocation of a lost and damaged world of childhood and the constants of his father's world: men defined by the drink they could take and the pain they could stand, men shaped by their guilt and machismo. A Lie About My Father is about forgiving but not forgetting, about examining the way men are made and how they fall apart, about understanding that in order to have a good son you must have a good father. Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Non-Fiction Book of the Year.
I Put a Spell on You
In this exquisite, haunting book, John Burnside describes his coming of age from the industrial misery of Cowdenbeath and Corby to the new world of Cambridge. The old Scots word ‘glamour’ means magical charm, and the first time he was played I Put a Spell on You, John Burnside thought he had never heard a more beautiful song – it was an enchantment, a fascination that would turn to obsession. Implicit in the song were all the ambiguities that intrigued him – love, possession, and danger – and this book is an exploration of the darker side of glamour and attraction. Beginning with memories of a brutal murder, the book follows the author through a series of uncanny encounters with â€...
Ashland & Vine
‘A master of language.’ Hilary Mantel Kate, a grieving, semi-alcoholic film student, invites an elderly woman to take part in an oral-history documentary. Jean declines but makes her a bizarre counteroffer: if Kate can stay sober for four days, she will tell her a story. If she can stay sober beyond that, there will be another, and then another, amounting to the entire history of one family’s life. Gradually, Jean offers a heart-breaking account, not only of her own history – a lost lover, a family scarred by war – but of the American century itself; as a deep connection emerges between the women which will transform both of their lives in this remarkable novel about love grief, and the power of unlikely friendships. ‘Burnside wrestles with hugeness in a way that few writers dare to ... convincingly gracious and profoundly necessary.’ Ali Smith
Dumb House
In Persian myth, it is said that Akbar the Great built a palace which he filled with newborns, attended only by mutes, in order to learn whether language is innate or aquired. As the children grew into their silent and difficult world, this palace became known as the Gang Mahal, or Dumb House. In his first novel, John Burnside explores the possibilities inherent in a modern-day repetition of Akbars investigations. The unnamed narrator creates a twisted variant of the Dumb House. When the children develop a musical language of their own, excluding their jailer, he extracts an appalling revenge.
