Book description
In the early 80s, after a decade of drug abuse and borderline mental
illness, John Burnside resolved to escape his addictive personality
and find calm in a 'Surbiton of the mind'. But the suburbs 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, masochistic relationship and, finally, the seemingly
flesh-and-blood embodiemnts of all his private phantoms.
The sequel to his haunting, celebrated account of a troubled
childhood, Waking Up in Toytown is unsettling, touching, oddly
romantic and unflinchingly honest.
John Burnside's last two books were the novel,
A Summer of Drowning
, shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Award, and his poetry collection,
Black Cat Bone
, which won both the 2011 Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize for
Poetry.
