The Long Delirious Burning Blue by Sharon Blackie

The Long Delirious Burning Blue by Sharon Blackie

'I have been asleep for forty years. This is what I need: this fear, this risk, this wind rocking my wings. This is what I have been missing. This is what it means to be alive - up here, on the edge of death.' Cat Munro's safe, carefully-controlled world as a corporate lawyer in Phoenix is disintegrating, and she is diagnosed with panic disorder just before her fortieth birthday. In a last-ditch attempt to regain control of her life, she faces up to her greatest fear of all: she decides to learn to fly. As she struggles to let go of old memories and the anxieties that have always held her back, Cat faces a choice: should she try to piece her old life back together again, or should she give in to the increasingly urgent compulsion to throw it all away? Several thousand miles away in Scotland, Cat's mother Laura faces retirement and a growing sense of failure and futility. Alone for the first time in her life, she is forced to face the memories of her violent and abusive marriage, the alcoholism that followed, and her resulting fragile relationship with Cat. But then she joins the local storytelling circle. And as she becomes attuned to the mythical, watery landscape around her, she begins to reconstruct the story of her own life . From the excoriating heat of the Arizona desert to the misty flow of a north-west Highland sea-loch, Sharon Blackie's first novel presents us with landscape in all its transformative power. An honest and moving exploration of the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, 'The Long Delirious Burning Blue' is above all a story of courage, endurance and redemption.

Blackie, Sharon: - Sharon Blackie is a writer and storyteller whose work sits at the interface of psychology, myth and ecology. She is the founder of EarthLines Magazine, described by Jay Griffiths as 'a deeply intelligent publication', by George Monbiot as 'a rare combination and much needed', and by Robert Macfarlane as 'a real point of convergence for many thought-tributaries and philosophical paths'. She is the author of 'The Long Delirious Burning Blue', a novel which the Independent on Sunday called 'hugely potent. A tribute to the art of storytelling that is itself an affecting and inspiring story', and which The Scotsman called 'powerful (reminiscent of The English Patient), filmic, and achieving the kind of symmetry that novels often aspire to, but rarely reach.' Her most recent book is 'If Women Rose Rooted', a nonfiction work about Celtic women in myth and contemporary life, described by bestselling novelist Manda Scott as 'mind-blowing in the most profound and exhilarating sense ... an anthem for all we could be. It's an essential book for this, the most critical of recent times.' Sharon now lives in the hills of Donegal, in Ireland, but was formerly a crofter on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Her experiences on the westernmost edges of the Celtic fringe give her a unique perspective on the psychology of belonging, and our relationship with place. www.sharonblackie.net

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780993541506
ISBN 10	099354150X
Title	The Long Delirious Burning Blue
Author	Sharon Blackie
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Riverwitch Press
Year published	2016-03-01
Number of pages	346
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.