Dining on Stones is Iain Sinclair's sharp, edgy mystery of London and its environs.
Andrew Norton, poet, visionary and hack, is handed a mysterious package that sees him quit London and head out along the A13 on an as yet undefined quest. Holing up in a roadside hotel, unable to make sense of his search, he is haunted by ghosts: of the dead and the not-so dead; demanding wives and ex-wives; East End gangsters; even competing versions of himself. Shifting from Hackney to Hastings and all places in-between, while dissecting a man's fractured psyche piece by piece, Dining on Stones is a puzzle and a quest — for both writer and reader.
'Exhilarating, wonderfully funny, greatly unsettling — Sinclair on top form' Daily Telegraph
'Prose of almost incantatory power, cut with Chandleresque pithiness' Sunday Times
'Spectacular: the work of a man with the power to see things as they are, and magnify that vision with a clarity that is at once hallucinatory and forensic' Independent on Sunday
Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor's Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital, Dining on Stones, Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances.Andrew Norton, poet, visionary and hack, is handed a mysterious package that sees him quit London and head out along the A13 on an as yet undefined quest. Holing up in a roadside hotel, unable to make sense of his search, he is haunted by ghosts: of the dead and the not-so dead; demanding wives and ex-wives; East End gangsters; even competing versions of himself. Shifting from Hackney to Hastings and all places in-between, while dissecting a man's fractured psyche piece by piece, Dining on Stones is a puzzle and a quest — for both writer and reader.
Praise for Iain Sinclair:
'A modern-day William Blake' Jacques Peretti, BBC Culture Show
'One of the finest writers alive' Alan Moore
'Eloquent chronicler of London's grunge and glory' Independent
'He writes with a fascinated, gleeful disgust, sees with neo-Blakean vision, listens with an ear tuned to the white noise of an asphalt soundtrack' The Times
'Sinclair is a genius. Sinclair is the poet of place' GQ
'Sinclair breathes wondrous life into monstrous, man-made landscapes' TLS
'Iain Sinclair is a reliably exhilarating writer' Telegraph
'He is incapable of writing a dull paragraph' Scotland on Sunday
Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor's Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory
London Orbital is Iain Sinclair's voyage of discovery into the unloved outskirts of the city.
Encircling London like a noose, the M25 is a road to nowhere, but when Iain Sinclair sets out to walk this asphalt loop — keeping within the 'acoustic footprints' — he is determined to find out where the journey will lead him. Stumbling upon converted asylums, industrial and retail parks, ring-fenced government institutions and lost villages, Sinclair discovers a Britain of the fringes, a landscape consumed by developers. London Orbital charts this extraordinary trek and round trip of the soul, revealing the country as you've never seen it before.
'My book of the year. Sentence for sentence, there is no more interesting writer at work in English'John Lanchester, Daily Telegraph
'A magnum opus, my book of the year. I urge you to read it. In fact, if you're a Londoner and haven't read it by the end of next year, I suggest you leave'Will Self, Evening Standard
'A journey into the heart of darkness and a fascinating snapshot of who we are, lit by Sinclair's vivid prose. I'm sure it will be read fifty years from now'J. G. Ballard, Observer
Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor's Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital, Dining on Stones, Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances.
A novel about London — its past, its people, its underbelly and its madness.
"In this extraordinary work Sinclair combines a spiritual inquest into the Whitechapel Ripper murders and the dark side of the late Victorian imagination with a posse of seedy book dealers hot on the trail of obscure rarities of that period. These ruined and ruthless dandies appear and disappear through a phantasmagoria interspersed with occult conjurings and reflections on the nature of fiction and history" Guardian