Great Regulars: [John] Burnside has produced a brilliant portrait

of isolation, and the way in which it encourages the inner world to expand until it blocks out "fallow and stepwise" outer experience. Nevertheless, key encounters structure the book.

The suicide, a man who wants his wife murdered, the beloved complicit in an erotics of pain, a single mother, the jail-bait and finally the phantom self: each acts as a dark archetype to reveal aspects of the psyche.

from Fiona Sampson: The Independent: Waking Up In Toytown, By John Burnside

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