Christopher Burns – författare

It begins on a quiet city street. A woman is robbed, the crime witnessed by a man holding a camera. In the aftermath, victim and voyeur meet. It ends six months later, by which point both their lives - and the way they choose to live them - have changed irrevocably. This is the story of what happened in-between.

How did we get into today's financial mess that not only threatens America but the entire world? Remember Enron? Why did that debacle happen? How do groups privy to special knowledge and "truths" make decisions that lead to disasters like the Iraq War, the sinking of the Titanic, and the blow up of the Challenger Shuttle? How could such informed experts end up being so wrong? In Deadly Decisions, Christopher Burns—one of the country's leading experts on modern information management—searches the biology of the brain, "group think," and the structure of organizations for practical answers to the problem of virtual truth—internally consistent evidence and assumptions that purport to describe reality, but often are dead wrong!• How can we avoid wishful thinking, information overload, uncertainty absorption, and an unintentional twisting of the facts? • Why are startup groups agile and innovative while large organizations lumber along, bogged down in false knowledge? • How can societies rediscover the power of truthful communication?Burns suggests that, as individuals, we must learn to be skeptical of our own sly and beguiling minds. As members of a group, we need to be more wary of the omissions, inventions, and distortions that come all too naturally to all of us. And as consumers of information we have to hold professionals, politicians, and the media more accountable. As Deadly Decisions makes clear, only through a deeper understanding of how individuals, groups, and society process information can we succeed in those extraordinary endeavors that are the promise of the Information Age.

With this new collection the acclaimed novelist Christopher Burns proves his mastery of the short story form. His intelligent but conflicted characters face their decisive moments across wide ranges of time and place, each action reshaping their futures and redefining their pasts. Interplaying with these choices are locations that underpin and define each story, such as a repository of unstable nitrate film, a desert outcrop where a daughter vanished, a winter barn in which a silent refugee works without explanation, and a Parisian suicide that echoes down far more than a century.In these stories, landscape itself can be a determinant, as essential to the narrative as the characters that walk into a draining reservoir, a Neolithic cave, or a remote Greek church. For these are driven people – haunted or determined, alert or unaware, lovers or doubters, saviours or perpetrators.Several of these stories have previously appeared in publications as diverse as Les Temps Modernes, Granta Shorts, Best British Short Stories, The Time Out Book of New York Stories and Prospect.Christopher Burns’ work has been praised by Kazuo Ishiguro, Melvyn Bragg, Margaret Drabble, Hilary Mantel and others. He is the author of six novels, including The Flint Bed (shortlisted for the Whitbread award), The Condition of Ice, A Division of the Light, and an earlier collection of short stories, About The Body. He lives in Cumbria.This is a wholly distinctive, ambitious and challenging collection that can be read again and again.