Alan Burns is one of the most challengingly innovative novelists in contemporary British fiction. Inspired by painters, he strives to create what René Magritte once described as the "magic of unforeseen affinities" by means of a collage, cut-up technique that he attributes to the fiction of William Burroughs. The result is a surreal assemblage of events, images, even syntactical arrangements that challenge the reader's comfortable assumptions about what a novel is or can be. Burns possesses a thoroughly original voice.

Burns was born in London on 29 December 1929 into the middle-class family of Harold and Anne Marks Burns and educated at the Merchant Taylors' School. When he was thirteen his mother died, and his older brother died two years later; both deaths profoundly affected him both emotionally and artistically. Burns has described the impact of these separations: "The consuming nature of this experience showed itself not only in...