Something Like Happy
John Burnside
In these remarkable stories, John Burnside takes us into the lives of men and women trapped in marriage, ensnared by drink, diminished by disappointment.
These are people for whom the idea of ‘home’ has become increasingly intangible, hard to believe – and happiness, or grace, or freedom, all now seem to belong in some kind of dream, or a fable they might have read in a children's picture book. As he says in one story, ‘All a man has is his work and his sense of himself, all the secret life he holds inside that nobody else can know.’ But in each of these normal, damaged lives, we are shown something extraordinary: a dogged belief in some kind of hope or beauty that flies in the face of all reason and is, as a result, both transfiguring and heart-rending.
‘There is no telling what kind of gifts one of John Burnside’s wonderful sentences will contain.’ Anne Enright
Product Details
About John Burnside
Reviews for Something Like Happy
Brian Morton
Independent
A haunting and beautiful collection that deserves to be read slowly and savoured but which you won’t be able to put down.
Caroline Jowett
Daily Express
Masterly… A spiritual, haunting book.
Francesca Angelini
Sunday Times
Burnside’s prose glitters.
Leyla Sanai
Independent on Sunday
Burnside brings a poet’s linguistic precision and emotional acuity… The writer’s deep, bloody engagement with the stuff of life can't fail to leave the reader enlivened, and keen to feel more.
Hannah McGill
Scotland on Sunday
Each [story] is a perfectly pitched, perfectly weighted gem.
Paul Dunn
Times
Burnside’s sentences flow with a music and logic that is inevitable yet compelling and display the keenest ear for life.
Ben Felsenburg
Metro
There is much familiar Burnside landscape here – the harsh beauty of dune-grass and headland, the casual and deadly knifing in the pub, the domestic violence… Magical.
Margaret Drabble
Spectator
For those unacquainted with his sublimely terrifying oeuvre, this is the place to start… Violence simmers under the surface of every story, breaking out in the kind of stark detail that becomes unforgettable.
Stuart Kelly
Guardian
John Burnside’s career is among the more remarkable in contemporary literature… Even his most routine stories have beauty and intelligence: he is never less than something like brilliant.
Robert Hanks
Telegraph