25 Books You Can't Put Down
Go on, take what you need. A perfect mystery, a mouthful of poetry...;
O serves up a smorgasbord of the
summer's best reads.
By Cathleen Medwick
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 GlisterReader's Guide: Get discussion questions for your book club
From the
July 2009 issue of
O, The Oprah Magazine
