A Lie About My Father

A moving, unforgettable memoir of two lost men: a father and his child. He had his final heart attack in the Silver Band Club in Corby, somewhere between the bar and the cigarette machine. A foundling; a fantasist; a morose, threatening drinker who was quick with his hands, he hadn’t seen his son for years. John Burnside’s extraordinary story of this failed relationship is a beautifully written evocation of a lost and damaged world of childhood and the constants of his father’s world: men defined by the drink they could take and the pain they could stand, men shaped by their guilt and machismo. A Lie About My Father is about forgiving but not forgetting, about examining the way men are made and how they fall apart, about understanding that in order to have a good son you must have a good father. Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Non-Fiction Book of the Year.

Reviews of A Lie About My Father

John Burnside has published seven works of fiction and eleven works of poetry, including The Asylum Ward, which won the 2000 Whitbread Poetry Award. His latest collection, Black Cat Bone, won the TS Eliot Prize in 2012. His Selected Poems was published in 2006, alongside his memoir, A Lie About My Father, which was the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Non-Fiction Book of the Year. The second volume of his memoir, Waking Up In Toytown, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2010. A Summer of Drowning was shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Novel Award.