LONG TAKE

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018, this noir narrative written with the intensity and power of poetry, 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 allowed film noir to flourish. The Dream had gone sour but, as those dark, classic movies made clear, the country needed outsiders to dramatize its new anxieties. While Walker tries to piece his life together, America is beginning to come apart. Deeply paranoid, doubting its own certainties and brutalised by social and racial division, spiralling corruption and the collapse of the inner cities, this is the story of a good man haunted by violence, and apparently doomed to return to it, yet resolved to find kindness again in a world and in himself. Through the lens of the film camera and the eye of a poet, the book is an examination of beauty and disintegration and is a work of thrilling originality. It is sub-titled 'A Way to Lose More Slowly'. The author is from Scotland and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Unusual typography and design in this poetic work of literature with photograph and map of downtown Los Angeles 1948-58. 236pp.