Living Nowhere

Description: 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. 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. Living Nowhere is a story of friendship and loss - a resonant, thrilling book that carries at its core a beautiful and terrible secret.

Review: "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

Author Biography: John Burnside has published eleven previous collections of poetry, including among them The Asylum Dance, which won the 2000 Whitbread Poetry Award, and six works of fiction, including the novel, A Summer of Drowning, which came out in 2011. He has also written two books of memoirs, A Lie About My Father and Waking Up In Toytown. His latest collection, Black Cat Bone, won both the Forward Prize for Poetry 2011 and the T.S. Eliot Prize 2011.

'Living Nowhere amply confirms his reputation as one of our finest prose stylists' - Guardian