A remarkable collection exploring ageing, mortality and environmental destruction**WINNER OF THE DAVID COHEN PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2023**'By far the best British poet alive' SPECTATOR'A master of language' HILARY MANTELIn this powerful, moving book, John Burnside takes his cue from Schiller, who recognised that, as one thing fades, so another flourishes: everywhere and always, in matters grea...

As a child, Luke’s mother often tells him the story of the Dumb House, an experiment on newborn babies raised in silence, designed to test the innateness of language.As Luke grows up, his interest in language and the delicate balance of life and death leads to amateur dissections of small animals – tiny hearts revealed still pumping, as life trickles away. But as an adult, following the death of his mother, Luke’s obsession deepens, resulting in a haunting and biza...

**A powerful exploration of life and death, illness and grace, wonder and beauty, in the posthumous collection from one of our greatest contemporary poets'It’s impossible not to love the world more when reading Burnside' GUARDIAN'A master of language' HILARY MANTEL**John Burnside’s last collection of new poems gathers around a single theme – mortality – and draws on his faltering health and earlier glances with death, creating a powerfully moving exploratio...

A young girl, Liv, lives with her mother on a remote island in the Arctic Circle. Her only friend is an old man who beguiles her with tales of trolls, mermaids, and the huldra, a wild spirit who appears as an irresistably beautiful girl, to tempt young men to danger and death. Then two boys drown within weeks of each other under mysterious circumstances, in the still, moonlit waters off the shores of Liv's home.Were the deaths accidental or were the boys lured to their doo...

Acclaimed author John Burnside delivers a profound, page-turning novel about innocence, evil, morality, and the dark corners of the human psyche.Mysterious illnesses affect the inhabitants of the post-industrial village of Innertown, and a pervasive sense of malaise hangs everywhere. So when teenage boys disappear into the poisoned woods surrounding the village’s abandoned chemical plant, no one notices, or if they do, they don’t say a thing. Not even the town’s only cop, whose lea...

The definitive selection of John Burnside's extraordinary and vibrant poems, taken from across decades but always stirring, curious, alert to the natural world and the people in it'It’s impossible not to love the world more when reading Burnside' GUARDIANOver thirty-five years and seventeen collections, John Burnside built a body of poetry that was consistently luminous, original and profound, always in thrall to the glamourie

John Burnside's remarkable book is full of strange, unnerving poems that hang in the memory like a myth or a song.These are poems of thwarted love and disappointment, of raw desire, of the stalking beast, 'eye-teeth/and muzzle/coated with blood'; poems that recognise 'we have too much to gain from the gods, and this is why/they fail to love us'; poems that tell of an obsessive lover coming to grief in a sequence that echoes the old murder ballads, or of a hunter lo...

Charles Arrowby has determined to spend the rest of his days in hermit-like contemplation.He buys a mysteriously damp house on the coast, far from the heady world of the theatre where he made his name, and there he swims in the sea, eats revolting meals and writes his memoirs. But then he meets his childhood sweetheart Hartley, and memories of her lovely, younger self crowd in – along with more recent lovers and friends – to disrupt his self-imposed exile. So inste...

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...

Abai Kunanbayev (1845-1904) is considered to be Kazakhstan's greatest cultural figure, a polymath whose work encompassed philosophy, translating foreign literature and musical composition. He is best known for his poetry, which played a central part in the founding of written Kazakh literature and which remains enduringly popular today.The publication of Abai: Book of Songs marks the 175th anniversary of the birth of Abai. This edition includes three musical compositions (kùj) and twenty-t...

Lucid, lyrical, and intellectually profound: this collection of poems resonates with life and death, but mostly what falls in between: the charmed darkness.Several ghosts haunt Learning to Sleep, from the author's mother, commemorated in an exquisitely charged variant on the pastoral elegy, to the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who wanders an implausible Lincolnshire landscape looking for some sign of belonging. Throughout the book, the powers and dominions of a los...

A novel of mysterious beauty, The Devil's Footprintsexplores the elemental forces of everyday life: love, fear, grief, and the hope of redemption.Michael Gardiner has lived in Coldhaven all his life yet still feels like an outsider. Married but distant from his wife, he discovers that a school friend, Moira Birnie, has killed herself and her two sons by setting their car ablaze. However, she spared her fourteen-year-old daughter, Hazel. As teenagers, Michael and Mo...