25 Books You Can't Put Down

The Glister by John Burnside

240 pages; Nan A. Talese/Doubleday

A chemically poisoned town, young boys who vanish one by one into the sinister woods, a deadly sin of omission. "Mistakes don't happen in a single moment," writes Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside in The Glister (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday). "They grow invisibly beneath the surface, running for years in the dark like the roots of some patient fungus till something erupts at the surface, some slick, wet fruiting body full of dark spores that stream out into the wind...tainting everything they touch." A dark morality tale, hauntingly told.

First chapter: Read an excerpt from The Glister
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