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Burnt Island

Alice Thompson

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Description for Burnt Island Paperback. Burnt island is about a literary novelist, Max Long, who wins a fellowship to Burnt island to write his next novel. He ends up staying with the very successful novelist James Fairfax whose wife had gone missing under mysterious circumstances. Num Pages: 224 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 197 x 130 x 20. Weight in Grams: 213.
For disillusioned author Max Long, the offer of a writing-fellowship on the mysterious-sounding `Burnt Island' is a godsend. Max is determined that, inspired by his tenure on this windswept outpost, he will produce every writer's dream - the bestseller. And this time, he plans to subvert his usual genre and write a horror story. But upon arrival, Max's fantasies of hermetic island life are overturned when he encounters a potential rival living in close proximity - the famously reclusive James Fairfax, author of the internationally-lauded novel, Lifeblood. Fairfax's ... Read more

Product Details

Publisher

Salt Publishing United Kingdom

Number of pages

224

Format

Paperback

Publication date

2013

Condition

New

Number of Pages

224

Place of Publication

Cambridge, United Kingdom

ISBN

9781907773488

SKU

V9781907773488

Shipping Time

Usually ships in 5 to 9 working days

Ref

99-91

About Alice Thompson

Alice Thompson was born and brought up in Edinburgh. She was the former keyboard player with post-punk eighties band, The Woodentops and joint winner with Graham Swift of The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for her first novel, Justine. Her second novel, Pandora's Box, was shortlisted for The Stakis Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year. Her other ... Read more

Reviews for Burnt Island

Fractured and lucid as a dream. Creepy and brilliant.
Ian Rankin At the end Thompson seems to be hinting that writing is a parasitic occupation, a form of vampirism even, writers taking the events of others' lives and using them as raw material, and in the relationship between Fairfax and Long that is taken to an extreme. Exquisitely written, ... Read morewith a real feel for the wide open spaces and the indifference of nature, but at the same time showing how these things are mirrored in the human heart, this is a miniature gem of a book, one that tells us something of the gothic while remaining thoroughly modern in the telling, with a meta-fictional streak that places the practice of writing itself under the microscope.
Peter Tennant
Black Static Magazine
Burnt Island is steeped in self-awareness, as a book about the process and effect of writing might be. It seems connected by literary electricity to other tales of isolation: The Shining, Pincher Martin, The Sea, The Sea. It might resist character development , but Max does learn that, however bad things can get for him, there is always someone who has had it worse: usually another writer.
John Self
The Guardian
Thompson's gripping narrative invites the reader to solve the mystery of Burnt Island and the true purpose of Max Long's fellowship. A dark, compelling novel with strong themes of paranoia and strange eroticism throughout.
Lizzie Greenhalgh
The Lady
What makes a book happen? Where does literary inspiration come from? These are some of the underlying questions asked by Alice Thompson's deliciously creepy tale that is almost an homage to surreal horror stories such as Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and John Fowles's The Magus.... Her prose style tackles these questions in spare and simple language, devoid of drama and, it would seem, ambiguity, and in that sense, she avoids echoing the richness of both Angela Carter and John Fowles, even as she appears to be paying her tribute to both of them. It's a wise decision, as this prose style also matches better the sparse landscape of the island itself. This is a simple yet clever tale, gently satirising literary ambition as it explores the darker sources of inspiration, and told with all the supernatural horror of the best Hammer stories.
Lesley McDowell
The Scotsman
A gothic music video of a novel that whirls with weirdness... madly energetic ... genuinely scary.
Stephen King - on Pharos Haunting, strange, Kafkaesque, poetic mystery.
Ian Rankin - on The Existential Detective The Existential Detective is unsettling, unsettlingly erotic, and somehow sadly beautiful. Thompson is fast becoming one of the most original and formidable writers in the English language today.
Sunday Herald - on The Existential Detective
Expertly combining compelling storytelling with a cleverly constructed, elegant and metaphor-ridden style.
Camilla Pia - on The Falconer A high-wire act of a novel. Try to resist it and you can't.
Fay Weldon - on Pandora's Box Angela Carter crossed with the Scottish diffidence of Muriel Spark.
Ali Smith - on Justine Show Less

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