It is 1999. Kate Lambert, a grieving, semi-alcoholic film student, invites an elderly woman to take part in an oral-history documentary. The woman, Jean Culver, declines, but makes her a bizarre counter-offer: if Kate can stay sober for four days, she will tell her a story. And if she can stay sober beyond that, there will be another, and then another, amounting to the entire history of one family’s life.
Though still shattered by the death of her father, and by the desultory abuse imposed by Laurits, her enigmatic collaborator and erstwhile lover – Kate is soon drawn into a Scheherazade-like matrix of tales, some painfully final, some still unfinished, in which Jean gradually offers a heartbreaking account, not only of one family, but of the American century itself, from World War II to Vietnam and the Weather Underground.
A profound, mysterious, deeply moving novel – a meeting of love and grief, like water on arid soil – Ashland & Vine is the story of an unlikely friendship that transcends time, age and the limits of narrative to reveal the unexpected grace that comes of listening to another’s history, while telling, as carefully as we can, what we know of our own.
About the Author
John Burnside is amongst the most acclaimed writers of his generation. His novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs have won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Award, the Encore Award and the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year. In 2011 he became only the second person to win both the Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes for poetry for the same book, Black Cat Bone. In 2015 he was a judge for the Man Booker Prize. He is a Professor in the School of English at St Andrews University.
Industry Reviews
What does it mean to live with integrity in the United States of America? That is the question haunting John Burnside's new novel... The way that Burnside layers these stories is masterful, and becomes a meditation on storytelling itself. -- Duncan White * Daily Telegraph *
A book of wintry landscapes, family secrets and alcoholism, but it's also a paean to the art of listening well that is especially welcome after the last 12 months of stridency...Burnside, who is also an accomplished poet, writes lyrical rose with virtuoso ease...Ashland & Vine is built on the trust that evolves between talker and listener; the movement of a mind trapped in its own uncertainties and a series of tableaux which build to a strange and stirring kind of redemption. -- Marcel Theroux * Guardian *
This is a novel that will no doubt be catching the eyes of judges of major prizes in 2017. * Big Issue, 2017 Books of the Year *
Ashland and Vine is a great book... It proceeds with such loping grandeur and is so tight-lipped about its themes that it takes a while for the realization to dawn that it is nothing short of an American epic. That, however, is what Burnside has written: a drifty, dreamy, dramatic epic. -- James Marriott * The Times *
Ashland & Vine proposes solace and joy in intergenerational friendship, and an optimism in what can be accomplished through talking and listening. -- Thomas Marks * Literary Review *
