Living Nowhere - Couverture souple

Corby, the industrial new town built around a vast steel works, draws many to the fires of its furnaces - in the hope of steady work, a better house, a fresh start. Amongst them are Francis Cameron, from Scotland, and his friend Jan Ruckert, the son of Latvian refugees. Though very different they are both outsiders; alienated, intelligent and curious, they form a strong and lasting bond: two teenage boys finding their feet in a foreign place. But violence hangs in the Corby air like the ash and the stench from the steel works, and when it comes down it is sudden and lethal - with repercussions that will last a lifetime. Reading John Burnside's fourth novel is like reading a dream: slow and mesmeric, interrupted by shocking, arbitrary acts of violence and the revelation of mysteries. Brilliantly evoking the turned-on, tuned-out seventies, with LSD the vehicle to reinvention, Living Nowhere is a story of friendship and loss, about trying to make a pure connection with the earth through a miasma of contamination. The journey at its centre is not an escape from grief, but an attempt - through solitude, rootlessness and a lot of acid - to recover a sense of worth and go forward, finally, to a new life beyond the poison and the waste. Meditative, profound and exquisitely crafted, Living Nowhere is the finest novel yet from a writer at the height of his powers - a resonant, thrilling book that carries at its core a beautiful and terrible secret.

"The savagery of Burnside's subject matter is finely juxtaposed with the mellifluous and redemptive beauty of his prose. A darkly compelling read" (Time Out)

"Burnside's prose is exquisite" (Sunday Times)

"In Living Nowhere, Burnside twins his poetic and storytelling talents as never before to produce a novel full of intrigue, atmosphere and startling imagery... Burnside is fond of the term alchemist; it applies to no one more than himself" (Glasgow Herald)

"John Burnside is a mighty writer... this is writing to stun the sentence, halt the mind...This is the gaze of John Burnside. The burning gaze of a poet: intense, peculiar, off-kilter and deeply interesting... A mighty achievement" (Sunday Herald)