A Summer of Drowning

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 ... breathtakingly good

Christina Patterson, 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

Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

Memorable, atmospheric and compelling

Tim Souster, Times Literary Supplement

A beautiful and haunting book...A charming and deeply imaginative novel

Aesthetica

Lyrical in his descriptions on the land of the midnight sun

Clare Colvin, 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

Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

[A Summer of Drowning] brings an eerie glow to the colours and sounds, flora and foodstuffs of the far north

Justine Jordan, Guardian

Written with deceptive elegance, riddled with gaps and non sequiturs and a clever travesty of several genres, this is a disturbing, provocative book'

Guardian

Unsettling, hauntingly memorable tale

Sunday Times

Burnside is an accomplished and careful writer. And this is a beautiful book, compelling and strange

Margaret Reynolds, The Times

In this beautifully sustained novel madness, mystery and myth-making collide. Burnside has an eerie attunement to the ineffable nature of existence and the fictions we construct to navigate and explain it

Adam O'Riordan, Financial Times

The novel invites you to view storytelling as akin to madness...In a book that often makes coded reference to itself to provoke serious thought as to what fiction is about, this counts as a joke. Its evasions may discomfit those who like to know exactly where they stand, but those who enjoy being teased as well as spooked should relish an eerie, ethereal novel that alludes to Lewis Carroll and uses methods of Hitchcock and David Lynch

Daily Telegraph

Burnside allows the ambiguity to remain in a hauntingly memorable book

Nick Rennison, Sunday Times