Book description
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.
John Burnside has published seven works of fiction and eleven works
of poetry, including
The Asylum Ward
, which won the 2000 Whitbread Poetry Award. His latest collection,
Black Cat Bone
, won the TS Eliot Prize in 2012. His
Selected Poems
was published in 2006, alongside his memoir,
A Lie About My Father
, which was the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and the Scottish Arts
Council Non-Fiction Book of the Year. The second volume of his memoir,
Waking Up In Toytown
, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2010.
A Summer of Drowning
was shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Novel Award.
