'There is no truer writer than John Burnside... [a] searching enquiry into a life: bruised, filled with grace and as plangent and haunting as any plainsong' Catherine Lockerbie, Scotsman
In the early '80s, after a decade of drug abuse and borderline mental illness, John Burnside resolved to escape his addictive personality and find calm in a 'Surbiton of the mind'. But the suburbs are not quite as normal as he had imagined and, as he relapses into chaos, he encounters a homicidal office worker who is obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock and Petula Clark, an old lover, with whom he reprises a troubled, masochistic relationship and, finally, the seemingly flesh-and-blood embodiments of all his private phantoms.
The sequel to his haunting, celebrated account of a troubled childhood, Waking Up in Toytown is unsettling, touching, oddly romantic and unflinchingly honest.
'Burnside's memoir deserves to become a classic. Has anyone written about the direct experience of mental illness with such scrupulous observation and wit?' Christopher Sylvester, Daily Express
'A brilliant portrait of isolation, and the way in which it encourages the inner world to expand until it blocks out 'fallow and stepwise' outer experience' Fiona Sampson, Independent
'An extraordinary book and one so honest it scorches' Carlo Gebler, Irish Times
