John Burnside Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Dumb House (1997)
  2. The Mercy Boys (1999)
  3. The Locust Room (2001)
  4. Living Nowhere (2002)
  5. The Devil’s Footprints (2007)
  6. Glister (2008)
  7. A Summer of Drowning (2011)
  8. Something Like Happy (2013)
  9. I Put A Spell On You (2014)
  10. Ashland & Vine (2017)

Collections

  1. Burning Elvis (2000)
  2. Crimespotting (2009)

Novellas

  1. Havergey (2017)

Anthologies edited

  1. Love for Love (2000)

Non fiction

  1. A Lie About My Father (2006)
  2. Waking Up in Toytown (2010)
  3. Aurochs and Auks (2021)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Novellas Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

John Burnside Books Overview

The Devil’s Footprints

Michael Gardiner has lived in Coldhaven all his life yet still feels like an outsider. Married but rather distant from his wife, he reads in the local paper that a school friend, Moira Birnie, has killed herself and her two sons by setting their car on fire; but she has spared her 14 year old daughter Hazel. Michael uneasily recalls his past connections to Moira. As teenagers, Michael and Moira had a brief romance, yet more troubling to Michael is the fact that he was responsible for the death of Moira’s brother, the town bully. In the wake of the tragedy, Michael becomes obsessed with Hazel, who is just old enough to be his daughter. Aware of his obsession, Hazel convinces Michael to take her away from the village and her father, an abusive and violent man. Setting his story against the untamed Scottish landscape, John Burnside has written a chilling novel that explores the elemental forces of everyday life: love, fear, grief, and the hope of redemption. In its ability to evoke and exploit our most primal fears, The Devil s Footprints prompts comparisons to the best of Stephen King. In both language and imagery, it is a novel of mysterious beauty, written with the clarity and power of a folktale.

Glister

Since George Lister’s chemical plant closed down, Innertown has been a shadow of its former self. In the woods that once teemed with life, strange sickly plants grow. Homes that were once happy are threatened by a mysterious illness. Here, a young boy named Leonard and his friends exist in a state of confusion and despair, as every year or so a boy from their school vanishes after venturing into the poisoned woods. Without conclusive evidence of foul play, the authorities consider the boys to be runaways. The town policeman suspects otherwise but, paralyzed with fear, he does nothing. And so it is up to the children who remain to take action. Their plan to stop the forces of evil that are destroying their town is at the shocking and terrifying heart of The Glister.

Crimespotting

All the short stories in ‘Crimespotting‘ are brand new and specially commissioned. The brief was deceptively simple – each story must be set in Edinburgh and feature a crime. The results range from hard-boiled police procedural to historical whodunit and from the wildly comic to the spookily supernatural.

Love for Love

This anthology was compiled by asking fifty poets to select their favorite love poem and write a poem of their own in response. The contributors, writing in English, Gaelic and Scots, include Andrew Greig, Meg Bateman, Stewart Conn, Valerie Gilles, Robin Robertson, Robert Crawford, Kate Clanchy, and Rody Gorman. Their chosen poems have been gathered from around the world and across the centuries and range from work by Pablo Neruda, Nina Cassian, and Pierre de Ronsard to Iain Crichton Smith, Robert Creeley, William Soutar, and Norman McCaig. This delightfully simple concept for an anthology of love poetry highlights the notion of the address as the lover beholds the beloved, a dialogue in which the present also beholds the past.

A Lie About My Father

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. And for all those years the two estranged men had been falling each at their own pace towards their own vanishing points. John Burnside’s extraordinary story of this failed relationship is an exquisitely written evocation of a lost and damaged world of childhood: from the condemned prefabs, overgrown gardens and haunted woods of Cowdenbeath to the simmering gang violence and industrial squalor of Corby. And through all this, 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. This was a life of secrets drunken rampages, adolescent fumblings, domestic violence, illicit affairs, angels in deserted houses which was to set a pattern of falling: binge drinking, drug abuse and emotional exile: trying to eradicate the past, trying to disappear. ‘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. John Burnside’s unflinching honesty, profound thinking and heart stopping images of beauty and fracture combine to create a moving, unforgettable memoir of two lost men: a father and his child.

Waking Up in Toytown

In the early 80s, after a decade of drug abuse and borderline mental illness, a man runs away to the suburbs, to live what he hopes will be a normal life. With the aid of his last remaining friends he finds a regular job, goes to AA meetings and resolves to ‘disappear into the banal’ to escape his addictive personality and find a ‘Surbiton of the mind’ but he can’t seem to outrun his own demons and, before long, he is back where he started. The suburbs, though, are not quite as normal as he had imagined and, as he relapses into chaos, he encounters a homicidal office worker who is obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock and Petula Clark, an old lover, with whom he reprises a troubled, maso*chistic relationship and, finally, the seemingly flesh and blood embodiments of all his private phantoms as he drifts further and further into unreality. The sequel to his haunting, celebrated account of a troubled childhood, ‘A Lie About My Father’, John Burnside’s startling new memoir follows his hopeless quest for peace and mental security as the ghosts and terrors close in and the illusion of Surbiton falls apart. Unsettling, touching, oddly romantic and unflinchingly honest, this is the story of one man’s search for sanity but it is also, in its own way, the true story of an impossible, unmanageable love.

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