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John Burnside was among the most acclaimed writers of his generation. His novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial, Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and, in 2023, he received the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in literature. In 2011 Black Cat Bone won both the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes for poetry. He died in 2024.Each story has a splash of intense colour at the heart… These are Scottish versions of the stories of Raymond Carver… Burnside writes tough, home-grown prose that inhabits the story form with perfect fit.
- Brian Morton, Independent
A haunting and beautiful collection that deserves to be read slowly and savoured but which you won’t be able to put down.
- Caroline Jowett, Daily Express
Masterly… A spiritual, haunting book.
- Francesca Angelini, Sunday Times
Burnside’s prose glitters.
- Leyla Sanai, Independent on Sunday
Burnside brings a poet’s linguistic precision and emotional acuity… The writer’s deep, bloody engagement with the stuff of life can't fail to leave the reader enlivened, and keen to feel more.
- Hannah McGill, Scotland on Sunday
Each [story] is a perfectly pitched, perfectly weighted gem.
- Paul Dunn, Times
Burnside’s sentences flow with a music and logic that is inevitable yet compelling and display the keenest ear for life.
- Ben Felsenburg, Metro
There is much familiar Burnside landscape here – the harsh beauty of dune-grass and headland, the casual and deadly knifing in the pub, the domestic violence… Magical.
- Margaret Drabble, Spectator
For those unacquainted with his sublimely terrifying oeuvre, this is the place to start… Violence simmers under the surface of every story, breaking out in the kind of stark detail that becomes unforgettable.
- Stuart Kelly, Guardian
John Burnside’s career is among the more remarkable in contemporary literature… Even his most routine stories have beauty and intelligence: he is never less than something like brilliant.
- Robert Hanks, Telegraph
In these remarkable stories, John Burnside takes us into the lives of men and women trapped in marriage, ensnared by drink, diminished by disappointment.
These are people for whom the idea of ‘home’ has become increasingly intangible, hard to believe – and happiness, or grace, or freedom, all now seem to belong in some kind of dream, or a fable they might have read in a children's picture book. As he says in one story, ‘All a man has is his work and his sense of himself, all the secret life he holds inside that nobody else can know.’ But in each of these normal, damaged lives, we are shown something extraordinary: a dogged belief in some kind of hope or beauty that flies in the face of all reason and is, as a result, both transfiguring and heart-rending.
‘There is no telling what kind of gifts one of John Burnside’s wonderful sentences will contain.’ Anne Enright
In these remarkable stories, John Burnside takes us into the lives of men and women trapped in marriage, ensnared by drink, diminished by disappointment; all kinds of women, all kinds of men – lonely, unfaithful, dying – driving empty roads at night.