Kirsty Gunn – författare

A twelve-year-old girl spends summers at a lake with her parents and little brother. The days are long and hot and while the parents entertain their friends the two children are left alone to play and dream and let the future come down upon them . . .This is a story of loss. Of how families come undone. How children grow up. And how by losing the one most dear you find that in the end only a kind of oblivion can comfort you.Exploring the way memory works, remembering both as a child and as an adult looking back on the child, Rain is an attempt to show the dissolving of the past. The reader is given the experience of remembering, along with the narrator, so that the story is not something told but is more like a dream, unravelling and disappearing while it is being read yet also yielding up each moment as intense, sweet, hypnotic.

FEATHERSTONE: an attractive, small rural town serving outlying estates; bank, post office, school . . . At first glance, Kirsty Gunn's small country town is like any other - a closely connected community bound by habit and familiarity. Yet as we're invited to spend the weekend in Featherstone we come to realise there's something about the place that unsettles us, something intense and intimate that goes deep into the lives of the people who live here and bares their hearts.'The title of Kirsty Gunn's beautiful new novel is a key - the marvellous weighting of words, how each word falls and floats on the page . . . a richly layered and rewarding novel.' Scotland on Sunday

From the author of Rain and Featherstone comes a story of a sun-drenched, sea-soaked day which changes a boy's life forever. At the start of a summer's day, Ward is waiting on the beach. His friend, Alex, wants him to come to a party at Alison's where there'll be girls and drinks and the possibilities of fun. But Ward is shy and self conscious and struggling to move from under the weight of his powerful father. He'd rather wait on the beach for the surf to come up. As the the sun moves towards its highest point and the girls' laughter carries along the wind towards Ward, the tide changes and Ward is faced with a dramatic event that will change his life forever. This beautiful and intense coming-of-age story captures perfectly the discomforts and challenges of being fifteen years old with the world stretching out in front of you. Sensual, heady, as though dazed by the heat of her pages, Gunn slowly unfolds a tale of danger and sexuality, of mothers and sons and the fathers who rule them, and of the sea.

'The hills only come back the same: I don't mind . . .' begins Kirsty Gunn's The Big Music, a novel that takes us to a new understanding of how fiction can affect us. Presented as a collection of found papers, appendices and notes, The Big Music tells the story of John Sutherland of 'The Grey House', who is dying and creating in the last days of his life a musical composition that will define it. Yet he has little idea of how his tune will echo or play out into the world - and as the book moves inevitably through its themes of death and birth, change and stasis, the sound of his solitary story comes to merge and connect with those around him. In this work of fiction, Kirsty Gunn has created something as real as music or as a dream. Not so much a novel as a place the reader comes to inhabit and to know, The Big Music is a literary work of undeniable originality and power.

This new collection of stories offers a candid peek at infidelity in all its guises. These are tales of lust, deceit, resentment and regret - and of the secrets and lies that can chip away at human relationships.In a series of interwoven dramas, we find mothers yearning for adventure, for the exhilaration of the open road or the anonymity of the forest; fathers absent in body or mind; husbands who look the other way; complacency turned to spite and apathy turned to betrayal. At the same time Gunn pursues the glorious rush of a snap decision, the liberty of answering that siren call of a better life elsewhere.Written with Gunn's trademark attention to nuances of behaviour, motive and even landscape, Infidelity is a temptingly beautiful work that asks 'What if?' and dares to find out.

Caroline's Bikini is the tale of a classic love affair; a swirling cocktail of obsession and imagination.The moment that Evan Gordonstone - a successful middle-aged financier - meets Caroline Beresford - a glamorous housewife, hostess and landlady - he falls into unrequited love, a story as old as Western literature itself. Evan recounts the tale of his infatuation to his friend Emily, and thus begins a hypnotic series of conversations set against the backdrop of West London bars, fuelled in intensity by endless G&Ts. From the depths of midwinter to July's hot swelter, Evan's retelling of his passion for Caroline will take him to the brink of his own destruction.

Exploring a host of female parts, rites of passage, love, loss, danger, revelations, strange relationships, the pleasures and pains of growing up female, a fantastic collection of short stories from some of the best women writers today dealing with all aspects of female life from youth to old age.Includes stories from: Hilary Bailey, Sally Cameron, Betzy Dinesen, Souad Faress, Chrissie Gittins, Bonnie Greer, Vicky Grut, Kirsty Gunn, Brigid Howarth, Mizzy Hussain, Geraldine Kaye, Carolyn Patrick, Ellen Phethean, Kate Pullinger, Stella Rafferty, Ravinder Randhawa, Máire Ní Réagáin, Michéle Roberts, Daphne Rock, Elisa Segrave, Kirsty Seymour-Ure, Susanna Steele & Karen Whiteson.

The classic poem, Goblin Market (1862) by Christina Rossetti, tells the story of Lizzie and Laura, who are tempted by the fruit sold by the goblin merchants. In this fully illustrated and beautiful volume, illustrator Georgie McAusland brings the words and story to life.SHORTLISTED in the V&A Illustration Awards and the World Illustration Awards.Breathing new life into the Victorian tradition of illustrated poems, this book reads like a picture story book. The stunning illustrations illuminate and drive the narrative forward as in all good story books. It tells the tale of the two sisters drifting apart as Laura succumbs to the forbidden fruit sold by the goblins, but the bonds of sisterhood prove strong. The poem has fascinated for generations and been the subject of various interpretations. This illustrated version brings the words and story alive for a new generation.Christina Rossetti is considered the foremost female poet of her time, and her poetry still resonates with women's lives today, as she entwines themes of sexuality, sisterhood, love and temptation in her work. All of these themes are encapsulated in Goblin Market. The book includes an introduction to the poem by novelist Kirsty Gunn, so all readers – for pleasure or study – can understand its riches.

A beautiful collection of poems to nourish, inspire and change the women who read them.This transformative collection of poems by female poets through the ages sing to us across the centuries. These poems span the worlds of desire, love and friendship, of responsibility, hardship and care, of family and friends and lovers. Their words empower us with strength and courage, fill us with verve and spirit, and inspire creativity and imagination.Contemporary voices of Fiona Benson and Jane Yeh join the evocative imagery of Christina Rossetti, Anna Akhmatova and Emily Dickinson. Even the haunting voices of ancient Sappho, Venmaniputti and Li Qingzhao touch today's generation. Here are poems written by women, with women's lives in mind. As Gertrude Stein writes, 'such a sweet singing' is in the poetry that comes to us clear and lovely from out of the dark. Read these poems aloud. Remember them. Share them.

When novelist Kirsty Gunn received a Randell Fellowship from the British Academy and Carnegie Foundation in 2009 she returned to New Zealand to spend the winter in Wellington, near the childhood home of Katherine Mansfield, the writer to whom she'd always felt most connected. In this lyrical essay, Gunn explores the ideas of home and belonging - and of her own deep connection to a place where every flower and gatepost seems embroidered with the memory of some story or another.