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A Lie About My Father
 
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A Lie About My Father (Hardcover)

by John Burnside (Author)
3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
RRP: £12.99
Price: £11.69 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
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A Lie About My Father + Glister + The Devil's Footprints
Price For All Three: £22.17

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  • This item: A Lie About My Father by John Burnside

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  • Glister by John Burnside

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  • The Devil's Footprints by John Burnside

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 323 pages
  • Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd (2 Mar 2006)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0224074873
  • ISBN-13: 978-0224074872
  • Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 13.8 x 3.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 296,774 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Jem Poster

"one of the most serious and authoritative voices in contemporary British poetry"


Independent: Creative Lives by Boyd Tonkin.

"brings to tender painful life the poet's damaged and damaging
parent"
See all Product Description

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A Lie About My Father
75% buy the item featured on this page:
A Lie About My Father 3.8 out of 5 stars (6)
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Customer Reviews

6 Reviews
5 star:
 (2)
4 star:
 (2)
3 star:
 (1)
2 star:
 (1)
1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.8 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant book, 5 Aug 2007
This review is from: A Lie About My Father (Paperback)
Maybe it takes a poet like Burnside to open up this tricky relationship. With a lying, violent drunk of a father, most men walk away, stay away or do the opposite, face up with the same rage then spend a life as a carbon copy. At one stage, knife in hand, Burnside comes close, even starting into the same drowing, LSD instead of booze. But it's not the relationship, it's the act of writing it, that impresses me - a towering kind of compassion that tries to get beyond the anger and self-loathing, to find a point of human contact, something of dignity, in what can't be shed. There are fathers like this everywhere, just tweak the profile to fit. But few sons would or could deconstruct the damage to make something admirable of it. This memoir is a monument to the humanity of men, to the unhardening of hearts. Everyone should read it, preferably before having a son.
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12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, 27 Feb 2006
By A Customer
If you only ever read one memoir in your life, make sure it's this one. None of the usual self-indulgence, but plenty of evocative, beautiful recollection of the difficult and fractured relationship between a boy and his father. Thoroughly recommend it.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Why is this the story of so many unloving and unloved men?, 9 Sep 2009
By E. Shaw "Kokoschka's_cat" (Leeds, England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: A Lie About My Father (Paperback)
John Burnside has written a remarkably courageous and deeply thoughtful book in this memoir of his father, who was abandoned as a baby and brought up in dire poverty in the lowlands of Scotland. Burnside is totally without sentimentality, yet his innate tenderness is never far from the surface, even though his relationship with his father was catastrophic.

Burnside's father was a drunkard, a liar and dissembler who ruled with threats and, later with violence. The lies came thick and fast - he lied about his origins, about his past life, and in the final analysis, about manhood - and it is a lie that so many men tell: that a man cannot own a true emotion; that he must not trust anyone; that he must be hard and unforgiving in order to survive. Why is this the story of so many unloving and unloved men? Burnside can't explain this, but what he does do is make it feel real.

As well as the story of his father, this book is also about Burnside's childhood, and what it led to as he grew up and left home. A dependency on psychotropic drugs and a life of drifting and falling - out of the world and into the imagination, and images and sensations are invoked to explain his own disaffections and self-damage. Sometimes the images are intensely beautiful and the writing seems to exist in its own time, beyond the limits of mere storytelling. Burnside is also a poet, and uses language to get behind events and beyond their mundanity to the core of sensations, feelings and events in order to say something profoundly universal about men and fatherhood. I found this brave book compelling reading.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Horribly fascinating
I found this fascinating, but horribly fascinating. It's a story of a desperate family, the father haunted by his past, surrendering to drink in the present - the mother holding... Read more
Published 8 months ago by J. Cranwell

2.0 out of 5 stars a bit of a yawn
I tend to buy fiction and memoir by poets because they usually produce concentrated, lyrical and richly written prose, but John Burnside's book had me turning over the pages to... Read more
Published on 10 Jun 2006 by poetry lover

3.0 out of 5 stars Childhood through a glass darkly
For the most part this is an enjoyable read, boy can the author write? A true poet from humble and desolate origins who evokes his childhood so imaginatively. Read more
Published on 3 April 2006 by Solo Walker

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