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by John Burnside
Michael Gardiner has lived in Coldhaven all his life yet still feels like an outsider. When Moira Birnie, convinced that her abusive husband is the devil, kills herself and her two young sons but spares her fourteen-year-old daughter, Hazel, Michael uneasily recalls his past connections to Moira. As teenagers, Michael and Moira had a brief romance; more troubling, Michael was responsible for the death of Moira’s brother, the town bully. In the wake of the tragedy, Michael becomes obsessed with Hazel, who is just old enough to be his daughter. Aware of his obsession, Hazel convinces Michael to take her away from the village and her father. Their journey takes readers backward and forward in time, gradually uncovering the secrets of the past.
"The plot doesn't hold together, but Burnside creates an intense, Stephen King-like atmosphere around Michael's observations and memories, and the complex cast's secrets and grudges." - Publishers Weekly.
"A quasi-mystery that spends too much time within the mind of the uninteresting first-person narrator .... The novel ultimately ties some knots but leaves too many strands loose." - Kirkus Reviews.
"Haughtily dismissed once as the purveyor of "an exercise in nastiness", Burnside has gone on to write works in which propitiation, unexpected epiphanies and reconciliation are as thrilling, haunting and provocative as violence and horror." - Scotland on Sunday.
"The Devil's Footprints is a classic tale with an old-fashioned, gripping plot. But it is also helplessly good at the things Burnside loves best: geography, the neighbours, the way people's lives go, and the way people's other, secret lives turn out. Above all, it does what stories do; against the odds, it effects the resurrection of Michael Gardiner, to begin his story anew." - The Guardian (UK) - Anne Enright, author of The Gathering.
"A spare, bewitching, beautifully written book…Burnside nimbly delineates the border where the actual and illusory meet: on both sides he finds dark and flinty human truths." - The Times.
"Burnside has written a haunting tale of crime and absolution; belonging and alienation; guilt and grief. Both this novel and [his poetry] are superb achievements. To be both a poet and novelist is highly unusual. To write so outstandingly well in both genres is a rarity indeed." - Financial Times.
This information about The Devil's Footprints was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
John Burnside has published five works of fiction and eleven collections of poetry, all published in the UK, and has won the Whitbread Poetry Award, and been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. His memoir, A Lie About My Father, was published in the United States in May 2007; The Devil's Footprints is his first novel to be published in the USA.
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