Review
`A beautiful and haunting book...A charming and deeply imaginative novel.' --Aesthetica
`Lyrical in his descriptions on the land of the midnight sun' --Daily Mail
`Burnside's prose has been frequently praised for its clarity, poetic sonority and fine cadences. It is certainly so here ... A Summer of Drowning marries philosophical meditation with the gooseflesh verve of a thriller' --Scotland on Sunday
'It's very, very rare for a writer to be equally good at poems and novels. John Burnside is. He's a brilliant poet, a brilliant memoirist, and a brilliant novelist ... There are, says Liv, "two kinds of seeing". One is about finding "what we have always been told is there". The other is about going "out alone in the world", like "a boy going out into the fields, or along the shore" who finds that "something creeps in at the edge of his vision". John Burnside is breathtakingly good at both' --The Independent
`The most defining aspect of Burnside's work aside from its linguistic exactness is the beauty of his prose. Quite simply, he is a wonderful writer. Whatever he is writing always seems real and, considering much of the content of this new novel, that is a considerable asset for any storyteller' --Irish Times
`memorable, atmospheric and compelling' --TLS
`Burnside allows the ambiguity to remain in a hauntingly memorable book.' --Sunday Times
`The novel invites you to view storytelling as akin to madness...In a book that often makes coded reference to itself to provoke serious thought as to what fiction is about, this counts as a joke. Its evasions may discomfit those who like to know exactly where they stand, but those who enjoy being teased as well as spooked should relish an eerie, ethereal novel that alludes to Lewis Carroll and uses methods of Hitchcock and David Lynch' --Daily Telegraph
`In this beautifully sustained novel madness, mystery and myth-making collide. Burnside has an eerie attunement to the ineffable nature of existence and the fictions we construct to navigate and explain it' --Financial Times
`Burnside is an accomplished and careful writer. And this is a beautiful book, compelling and strange.'
--The Times
`Unsettling, hauntingly memorable tale.' --The Sunday Times
`Written with deceptive elegance, riddled with gaps and non sequiturs and a clever travesty of several genres, this is a disturbing, provocative book'. --The Guardian
Book Description
A terrifying and dream-like new novel from one of our greatest contemporary writers.