One of the great American writers of our time

Ellroy is the author of some of the most powerful crimer novels ever written

Burnside allows the ambiguity to remain in a hauntingly memorable book

In this beautifully sustained novel madness, mystery and myth-making collide. Burnside has an eerie attunement to the ineffable nature of existence and the fictions we construct to navigate and explain it

The novel invites you to view storytelling as akin to madness...In a book that often makes coded reference to itself to provoke serious thought as to what fiction is about, this counts as a joke. Its evasions may discomfit those who like to know exactly where they stand, but those who enjoy being teased as well as spooked should relish an eerie, ethereal novel that alludes to Lewis Carroll and uses methods of Hitchcock and David Lynch

Memorable, atmospheric and compelling

A beautiful and haunting book...A charming and deeply imaginative novel

Lyrical in his descriptions on the land of the midnight sun

Burnside's prose has been frequently praised for its clarity, poetic sonority and fine cadences. It is certainly so here ... A Summer of Drowning marries philosophical meditation with the gooseflesh verve of a thriller

Burnside is an accomplished and careful writer. And this is a beautiful book, compelling and strange

Unsettling, hauntingly memorable tale

Written with deceptive elegance, riddled with gaps and non sequiturs and a clever travesty of several genres, this is a disturbing, provocative book'

[A Summer of Drowning] brings an eerie glow to the colours and sounds, flora and foodstuffs of the far north