Waking Up in Toytown, John Burnside romance and apprentices himself to a

and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs

and shows how it is linked to pesticides

revealing the outsized role of luck in our lives and how best to play the system

a shabby Turkish tycoon

You don’t expect to die

Waking Up in Toytown, John Burnside romance and apprentices himself to aIn 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, as 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,