Living Nowhere - Softcover

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.

John Burnside’s most recent books include the collection of stories, Something Like Happy and the poetry collection, Black Cat Bone, which won both the 2011 Forward Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. His latest novel, Ashland & Vine, and collection of poetry, Still Life with Feeding Snake, are both published in February 2017.