The Long Take: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: Robin Robertson - Hardcover

Robertson, Robin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1509846883 ISBN 13: 9781509846887

Publisher: Picador, 2018

Synopsis

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, winner of the Goldsmiths Prize, The Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

'A beautiful, vigorous and achingly melancholy hymn to the common man that is as unexpected as it is daring' John Banville, Guardian

A noir narrative written with the intensity and power of poetry, The Long Take is one of the most remarkable – and unclassifiable – books of recent years.

Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can’t return home to rural Nova Scotia, and looks instead to the city for freedom, anonymity and repair. As he moves from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco we witness a crucial period of fracture in American history, one that also allowed noir to flourish. The Dream had gone sour but – as those dark, classic movies made clear – the country needed outsiders to study and dramatise its new anxieties.

While Walker tries to piece his life together, America is beginning to come apart: deeply paranoid, doubting its own certainties, riven by social and racial division, spiralling corruption and the collapse of the inner cities. The Long Take is about a good man, brutalised by war, haunted by violence and apparently doomed to return to it – yet resolved to find kindness again, in the world and in himself.

Robin Robertson's The Long Take is a work of thrilling originality.

About this title

Review:

Wondrous . . . Probably the best novel of the year (Economist, Books of the Year)

The Long Take is like a film noir on the page. A book about a man and a city in shock, it’s an extraordinary evocation of the debris and ongoing destruction of war even in times of peace. In taking a scenario we think we know from the movies but offering a completely different perspective, Robin Robertson shows the flexibility a poet can bring to form and style. (Man Booker judges’ citation)

A beautiful, vigorous and achingly melancholy hymn to the common man that is as unexpected as it is daring . . . The Long Take is a masterly work of art, exciting, colourful, fast-paced – the old-time movie reviewer’s vocabulary is apt to the case – and almost unbearably moving. (John Banville Guardian)

‘Absolutely stunning...his beautiful verse describes things better than any picture could... The language is astonishing.’ (Arifa Akbar Front Row)

The Long Take shows it is perfectly possible to write poetry which is both accessible and subtle, which has a genuine moral and social conscience . . . This is a major achievement and will linger long in the reader's mind (Stuart Kelly Scotsman on Sunday)

Composed in a mixture of verse and prose, The Long Take is a book with a big heart. The beauty of the language will seduce the reader from the very start. How do we put ourselves back together in a damaged world? . . . By taking this long journey west – across New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles – Robin Robertson tells a universal story. With its undeniable beauty; quiet, modest but strong pull, this book will shift something in your soul. By the time you have finished reading it, you won’t quite be the same. (Elif Shafak)

Bold, brilliant, filled with wonderful imagery and meticulously researched, this is as poignant and visual as classic film noir. (Ian Rankin)

As a work of art, this dreamlike exploration is a triumph; as a timely allegory, it is disturbingly profound... One of the first major achievements of 21st-century English-language literature. (Financial Times)

This is a poem-cum-novel by Scottish writer Robin Robertson, the prize-winning author of five previous poetry collections, which is a cinematic road trip through America. It’s from the point of view of Walker, a discharged World War II combat vet. Rather than return to Canada at the end of the war, he drifts from New York to Los Angeles to San Francisco. There are flashbacks to the war but he basically walks through an America which changes around him. It’s an incredible achievement, showing how poetry can reach the parts narrative prose can’t. (Irvine Welsh Metro)

Robertson has cast a national, cultural, psychological and class outsider of vibrant and seedy post-war America into a palpable anti-hero eerily resonant with our contemporary world. The result is a ravishing achievement. (Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize)

Book Description:

A powerful genre-defying work from award-winning poet Robin Robertson which follows a D-Day veteran as he goes in search of freedom and repair in post-war America.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1509846883
• ISBN 13: 9781509846887
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256