A terrifying and dream-like new novel from one of our greatest contemporary writers.
At a critical point in her career, painter Angelika Rossdal suddenly moves to Kvaloya, a small island deep in the Arctic Circle, to dedicate herself to the solitary pursuit of her craft. With her, she brings her young daughter, Liv, who grows up isolated and unable or unwilling to make friends her own age, spending much of her time alone, or with an elderly neighbour, Kyrre Jonsson, who beguiles her with old folk tales and stories about trolls, mermaids and -- crucially for the events that unfold in the...

Tells the story of a lost and damaged world of childhood and the constants of his father's world: men defined by drink they could take and the pain they could stand, men shaped by their guilt and machismo. This book examines the way men are made and how they fall apart, about understanding in order to have a good son you must have a good father.

Over 17 years and nine collections, John Burnside has built--in the words of Bernard O'Donoghue--"a poetic corpus of the first significance," a poetry of luminous, limpid grace. His territory is the no-man's-land of threshold and margin, the charmed half-light of the liminal, a domestic world threaded through with mystery, myth, and longing. In this volume these themes emerge and develop within the growing confidence of Burnside's sinuous lyric poise: the place of the individual in the world, the idea of dwelling and home, and the lure of absence and escape are set against the possibilities...

To the Shakers, a good song was a gift; indeed the test of a song s goodness was how much of a gift it was. In their call to "labour to make the way of God your own," Shaker artists expressed an aesthetic that had much in common with the old Japanese notion, attributed to Hokusai, that to paint bamboo, one had first to "become" bamboo. In his 10th collection, John Burnside begins with an interrogation of the gift song, treating matters of faith and connection, the community of living creatures and the idea of a free churchwhere faith is placed, not in dogma or a possible credo, but in the...

John Burnside's book is full of strange, unnerving poems that hang in the memory like a myth or a song. These are poems of thwarted love and disappointment, of raw desire, of the stalking beast; poems that recognise we have too much to gain from the gods, and this is why they fail to love us.Winner of the 2011 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.Shortlisted for Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection 2011.

John Burnside's first novel, his profoundly disturbing and beautifully-written story of scientific curiousity gone awry.
In Persian myth, it is said that Akbar the Great once built a palace which he filled with newborn children, attended only by mutes, in order to learn whether language is innate or aquired. As the year passed and 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 possibilites inherent in a modern-day repetition of Akbars investigations. Following the...

A book of poems live at the edge of loss, or on the cusp of epiphany, always seeking that brief instant of grace when we see what is before us, and not just what we expected to find.

Although mostly concealed, our bedrock geology profoundly determines what we see around us - not just our landforms, but the built environment too, from Aberdeen, often called the "granite city" to Bath, constructed from honey-coloured limestone- rocks shape the world around us. In Cornerstones, some of Britain's leading landscape and nature writers consider their relationship with the ground beneath their feet. Distinguished by a strong sense of place and close observation, these essays take the reader out into the landscape and convey the tactile heft, grain and rub of the rock, showing how...

A major new account of poetry in the twentieth century.