The Glister

Zusatztext “Brilliant. . . . Beautiful and frightening.” —The New York Times Book Review   “Haunting. . . . [A] darkly beautiful meditation on death! guilt and redemption.” —The Los Angeles Times Book Review   “A deeply philosophical tale that goes right to the heart of existence and what one must to do! despite circumstances! to retain humanity.”— St. Petersburg Times    "Burnside builds mood and atmosphere with fearsome skill." — Chicago-Sun Times     "By turns beguiling! sinister! playful and never less than mesmerizing. . . . [ The Glister ] will haunt you." —Irvine Welsh! Guardian    "A hauntingly mysterious . . . story about disappearances and environmental decay." — Toronto Star   "Like a later day Jekyll and Hyde! Burnside can turn from luminous verse to prose that keeps you up at night. The Glister is such a novel." — The Financial Times   Informationen zum Autor John Burnside Klappentext 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 leads have long since died. To one boy, however, the chemical plant is beautiful, and it is there he will enact a plan to change the fate of the children of Innertown. To do so he will have to confront the blinding reality that burns in the chemical plant's cavernous center.HOMELAND In the beginning, John Morrison is working in his garden. Not the garden at the police house, which he has long neglected, and not the allotment he rented when he was first married, but the real garden, the only garden, the one he likes to think of as a shrine. A sacred place, like the garden in a medieval Resurrection. To anyone else, it would look like nothing more than a patch of flowers and baubles, set out in a clearing amid the poison wood, just above the old freight line; but then nobody else could ever see its significance. Morrison created this garden himself and he has maintained it for seven years: a neat square of poppies and carnations, dotted here and there with the knuckles of polished glass and stone that he collects on his long walks around the Innertown and the wasteland beyond, filling the pockets of his police uniform with worthless treasure as he pretends to go about his duties. Of course, these days, he has no real duties, or none he could ever believe in. Brian Smith saw to that, years ago, when Morrison made the one big mistake of his career--the one big mistake of his life, other than marriage. That was the day when Smith talked him into concealing the first of the Innertown disappearances. Now, with five boys missing, Morrison is almost ashamed to show his face on the street. Not that anybody knows about the lie, the confidence trick, that he has perpetrated upon them all. People want to know where the Innertown children have gone, but aside from the families of the missing boys, nobody expects anything much from him. They know he doesn't have the training or the resources to track the boys down, and they also know that nobody beyond their poisoned tract of industrial ruin and coastal scrub cares a whit about what happens to the Innertown's children. Even the families give up after a while, sinking into mute bewilderment, or some sad regime of apathy and British sherry. After more than a decade of dwindling hopes for their town and for their children, people have become fatalistic, trying to find, in indifference, the refuge they once sought in the modest and mostly rather vague expectation of ordina...

Product details

• Authors: John Burnside
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 09.02.2010
• EAN: 9780307455338
• ISBN: 978-0-307-45533-8
• No. of pages: 272
• Dimensions: 135 mm x 205 mm x 23 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Suspense; Schottische SchriftstellerInnen: Werke (div.)