Books by John Burnside

A profound, mysterious, deeply moving novel - a meeting of love and grief, like water on arid soil - Ashland & Vine is the story of an unlikely friendship that transcends time, age and the limits of narrative to reveal the unexpected grace that comes of listening to another's history, while telling, as carefully as we can, what we know of our own.

From our earliest childhood experiences, we learn to see the world as contested space: a battleground between received ideas, entrenched conventions and myriad Authorised Versions on the one hand, and new discoveries, terrible dangers, and everyday miracles on the other.

In Persian myth, it is said that Akbar the Great once built a palace which he filled with newborn children, attended only by mutes, in order to learn whether language is innate or aquired.

Beginning with memories of a brutal murder, this book takes you through a series of uncanny encounters with 'lost girls', with brilliant digressions on murder ballads, voodoo, acid and insomnia.

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.

In the early 80s, after a decade of drug abuse and borderline mental illness, the author resolved to escape his addictive personality and find calm in a 'Surbiton of the mind'. This title tells is an account of a troubled childhood.

Nobody knows where these boys go, or whether they are alive or dead, and without evidence the authorities claim they are simply runaways. He was involved in the cover-up of one boy's murder, and he believes all the boys have been killed.

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.

Presents a collection of poems. This work contains gift song, treating matters of faith and connection, the community of living creatures and the idea of a free church, explorations of time and place, the beginnings of a renewal of the connection to, and faith in, an ordered world.

Contains a collection of poems of John Burnside.