Waking Up in Toytown
Regular price
€21.99
80s
a lie about my father
a summer of drowning
A01=John Burnside
Author_John Burnside
autobiography
biographies
biographies and autobiographies
biography
black cat
Category=DNC
desire's addiction
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
forward prize
health
memoir
mental health
self help
suburbia
Product details
- ISBN 9780099507833
- Weight: 191g
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 06 Jan 2011
- Publisher: Vintage Publishing
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
John Burnside was among the most acclaimed writers of his generation. His novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial, Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and, in 2023, he received the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in literature. In 2011 Black Cat Bone won both the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes for poetry. He died in 2024.
