With wit, precision and grace, John Burnside's second memoir traces the aftershocks of a troubled childhood into troubled adulthood. With a new introduction by Sarah Perry-Among the best writers of his generation, fully voiced and perfectly pitched- Andrew O-HaganIn the early 80s, after a decade of drug abuse and borderline mental illness, John Burnside resolved to escape his addictive personality and find calm in a -Surbiton of the mind.- But the suburbs are not quite as normal as he had imagined, and he relapses into chaos. He encounters a homicidal office worker who is obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock and Petula Clark, an old lover, with whom he reprises a troubled, masochistic relationship and, finally, the seemingly flesh-and-blood embodiments of all his private phantoms, as he drifts further into unreality. The second of John Burnside-s extraordinary trilogy of memoirs, Waking Up in Toytown is the story of one man-s search for sanity - but also the story of love that outgrows its r
