Waking Up in Toytown

With wit, precision and grace, John Burnside's second memoir traces the aftershocks of a troubled childhood into troubled adulthood.<BR><BR>With a new introduction by Sarah Perry<BR><BR>'Among the best writers of his generation, fully voiced and perfectly pitched' Andrew O'Hagan<BR><BR>In the early 80s, after a decade of drug abuse and borderline mental illness, John Burnside resolved to escape his addictive personality and find calm in a 'Surbiton of the mind.' But the suburbs are not quite as normal as he had imagined, and he relapses into chaos.<BR><BR>He encounters a homicidal office worker who is obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock and Petula Clark, an old lover, with whom he reprises a troubled, masochistic relationship and, finally, the seemingly flesh-and-blood embodiments of all his private phantoms, as he drifts further into unreality.<BR><BR>The second of John Burnside's extraordinary trilogy of memoirs, Waking Up in Toytown is the story of one man's search for sanity - but also the story of love that outgrows its restraints and a scorching enquiry into the soul, from one of our greatest contemporary writers.<BR><BR>'Burnside's memoir deserves to become a classic. Has anyone written about the direct experience of mental illness with such scrupulous observation and wit?' Daily Express

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