The Glister

Product Description Fifteen-year-old Leonard lives in the decaying coastal community of Innertown. Every year or so, a boy from Leonard s school disappears, vanishing into the wasteland of the old chemical plant. Nobody knows where these boys go or whether they are alive or dead, and without evidence to the contrary, the authorities claim they are simply runaways. The local children want to know the truth, and Leonard takes refuge in the poisoned ruins of the old chemical plant, where he renews his friendship with an itinerant ecologist known as the Moth Man and discovers a shocking truth. Review Burnside delivers a cautionary tale illustrating that greed and an indifference to suffering are the real horrors of modern life... [B]leakly beautiful.... Burnside expertly details an apocalyptic landscape where the expectation of failure is rampant....Burnside's flawless prose explores how defeat is only a state of mind. --Publishers WeeklyNobody does eerie quite like John Burnside. His exquisite and haunting new novel Glister...has an insistent force, overturning the reader s expectations and building to a truly shocking climax....I doubt I will read a more unsettling and memorable book this year. --ScotsmanThe Glister is wickedly good. Burnside writes with a dark and beautiful splendor, navigating the space between despair and redemption in a simply brilliant story that will linger long after the last, haunting images. --Keith Donohue, author of The Stolen Child About the Author JOHN BURNSIDE is the author of the novel The Devil's Footprints and the memoir A Lie about My Father, as well as five works of fiction and eleven collections of poetry published in the United Kingdom.