Ghost Stations: Essays and branchlines

Patrick McGuinness – poet, novelist, translator, editor, critic and speaker of several languages – writes in Ghost Stations about his personal history, the unofficial histories of places in which he has lived, and some of the lesser known byways of European literature and art. He re-opens branchlines closed for ‘efficiency’. He notices the extraordinary hiding in plain sight – in the local, the mundane. His book is an act of resistance and modest, undogmatic revelation.

‘McGuinness celebrates an ordinariness so entrenched as to seem supernatural . . . Under McGuinness’s attention all this, and all the other glimpsed and overheard life, become fascinating, charming, poignant, comic, daft at times, and absolutely deserving of the effort to preserve and transmit an intimate strangeness.’
     – Sean O’Brien

‘Patrick McGuinness writes of the other country of childhood with Proustian élan and Nabokovian delight.’
     – John Banville

‘He takes his place among those singers and painters of the haunted, the melancholy, the diminished, the caricatural, the humdrum.’ 
     – Michael Hofmann, Guardian

‘A multitalented writer . . . The balance, charm and wit of the writing are remarkable.’
     – Kate Kellaway, Observer

‘McGuinness has a delightfully distinctive voice . . . His buoyant imagination always carries the day.’
     – Claire Harman, TLS

‘[McGuinness] combines elegant prose with caustic commentary on romance, education and crime . . . Most people can write for a lifetime and not produce so perfect a sentence.’
     – Patrick Anderson, Washington Post

‘His prose, like his poetry, is a marvel to behold . . . one of the finest British authors of his generation.’
     – New Republic