A Summer of Drowning

`A beautiful and haunting book...A charming and deeply imaginative novel.' --Aesthetica

`Lyrical in his descriptions on the land of the midnight sun' --Daily Mail

`Burnside's prose has been frequently praised for its clarity, poetic sonority and fine cadences. It is certainly so here ... A Summer of Drowning marries philosophical meditation with the gooseflesh verve of a thriller' --Scotland on Sunday

'It's very, very rare for a writer to be equally good at poems and novels. John Burnside is. He's a brilliant poet, a brilliant memoirist, and a brilliant novelist ... There are, says Liv, "two kinds of seeing". One is about finding "what we have always been told is there". The other is about going "out alone in the world", like "a boy going out into the fields, or along the shore" who finds that "something creeps in at the edge of his vision". John Burnside is breathtakingly good at both' --The Independent

`The most defining aspect of Burnside's work aside from its linguistic exactness is the beauty of his prose. Quite simply, he is a wonderful writer. Whatever he is writing always seems real and, considering much of the content of this new novel, that is a considerable asset for any storyteller' --Irish Times