Dining on Stones

Dining on Stones

Summary

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; Lud Heat; Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital, Ghost Milk, Dining on Stones and Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances.

About the author

Iain Sinclair

Iain Sinclair is the author of numerous works of fiction, poetry non-fiction, including Lud Heat; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Downriver; Radon Daughters; Lights Out for the Territory; Rodinsky's Room, with Rachel Lichtenstein; Landor's Tower; London Orbital; Dining On Stones; Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk; American Smoke and London Overground. Downriver won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award. He lives in Hackney, east London.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more