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Sign up todayThe Glister
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Learn moreFifteen-year-old Leonard describes his hometown as a contemporary hell: part industrial ruin, part Dante’s Inferno. The poisoned woods and the derelict buildings are haunted by wild children, a strange, sickly fauna, and the mysterious Moth Man, an itinerant ecologist who appears to be conducting a bizarre survey into local insect populations, but might just as easily be the angel of the Lord. Every year or so, a boy from Leonard’s school disappears, vanishing into the wasteland of the old chemical plant. Nobody knows where these boys go, or whether they are alive or dead. Without evidence to the contrary, the authorities claim they are simply runaways. But Morrison, the town policeman, knows otherwise. Determined to learn the truth for himself, Leonard takes refuge in the poisoned ruins of the plant, where he renews his friendship with the Moth Man and exacts a shocking revenge on the policeman before entering the mysterious Glister.
John Burnside is the author of the novel The Devil's Footprints and the memoir A Lie about My Father, as well as five works of fiction and eleven collections of poetry published in the United Kingdom.
John Lee is the winner of numerous Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration. His has twice won acclaim as AudioFile’s Best Voice in Fiction & Classics. He also narrates video games, does voice-over work, and writes plays. He is an accomplished stage actor and has written and coproduced the feature films Breathing Hard and Forfeit. He played Alydon in the 1963–64 Doctor Who serial The Daleks.
Reviews
“John Burnside explores with a delicious feathery touch the infectious nature of violence and its capacity to seduce, in ways that are almost beautiful. This tantalizing, horrific novel is steeped in a terrible sense of wonder.”
“What makes Glister most astonishing is that poet-novelists, such as Burnside, seldom succeed. Yet he has shown it can be done gloriously…Glister is a powerful, mesmerizing experience.”
“Burnside brings his powers of pared-down narration to bear on a tale of dereliction, loss and possible redemption…Burnside’s story employs suggestion and ambiguity rather than explicit statement, but it has the power that comes from leaving plenty of space in which the reader’s own imagination can go to work.”
“One of the most original and exhilarating reads of the year…A work begging a second reading, it is an exceptionally rich treasure which goes beyond telling a disconcerting and disorienting story to illuminate the infinite possibilities of the novel.”
“Nobody does eerie quite like John Burnside. His exquisite and haunting new novel Glister…has an insistent force, overturning the reader’s expectations and building to a truly shocking climax…I doubt I will read a more unsettling and memorable book this year.”
“Burnside can turn from luminous verse to prose that keeps you awake at night…In the end we are left with the resonance of a book whose centre is nowhere but whose circumference is extraordinarily large.”
“Bleakly beautiful…Burnside expertly details an apocalyptic landscape where the ‘expectation of failure’ is rampant…Burnside’s flawless prose explores how defeat is only a state of mind.”
“Narrator John Lee expertly translates the story of the dreary, doomed village to the spoken word. His Scottish accent only adds to the foreignness of the world that Burnside paints. With Lee’s mesmerizing delivery the story slips from one character to another as easily as it slides from the past to the present. This is a book you won’t be able to turn off as you search for the thread that connects the mystery.”
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