Burnside, John, 1955-

It is 1999. Kate Lambert, a grieving, semi-alcoholic film student, invites an elderly woman to take part in an oral-history documentary. The woman, Jean Culver, declines, but makes her a bizarre counter-offer: if Kate can stay sober for four days, she will tell her a story. And if she can stay so...

John Burnside's seventh collection of poems explores the tension between the sanctuary of home and the lure of escape, his vision of a domestic world threaded through with myth and longing.

Once, on a winter's night many years ago, after a heavy snow, the devil passed through the Scottish fishing town of Coldhaven, leaving a trail of dark hoofprints across the streets and roofs of the sleeping town. Michael Gardiner has lived in Coldhaven all his life, but still feels like an outsid...

In his tenth collection of poems, John Burnside begins with an interrogation of the gift song and moves on through explorations of time and place, towards a tentative and idiosyncratic re-ligere, the beginnings of a renewal of the connection to, and faith in, an ordered world.

John Burnside's 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 collection he develops those themes looking at the place of the individual in the world and the idea of home ent...

The sequel to 'A Lie About My Father', John Burnside's 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 sea...