Iain Sinclair

Encircling London like a noose, the M25 is a road to nowhere, but when iain Sinclair sets out to walk this asphalt loop - keeping within the 'acoustic footprints' - he is determined to find out where the journey will lead him. Stumbling upon converted asylums, industrial and retail parks, ring-fenced government institutions and lost villages, Sinclair discovers a Britain of the fringes, a landscape consumed by developer, London Orbital charts this extraordinary trek and round trip of the soul, revealing the country as you've never seen it before.

London Orbital

"Crazy, dangerous, prophetic" Angela Carter In DOWNRIVER, Iain Sinclair traces the ruins of Margaret Thatcher's reign through the lens of a fictional film crew that has been hired to make a documentary about what's left of London's river life. The Thames may still flow through the heart of the capital, but life along its shores has changed dramatically. DOWNRIVER is a savage, satirical quest to understand how people's lives, a government's policies and a legendary waterland conspire together in a boggling display of self-destruction.

Downriver

Dining on Stones is Iain Sinclair's sharp, edgy mystery of London and its environs Andrew Norton, poet, visionary and hack, is handed a mysterious package that sees him quit London and head out along the A13 on an as yet undefined quest. Holing up in a roadside hotel, unable to make sense of his search, he is haunted by ghosts: of the dead and the not-so dead; demanding wives and ex-wives; East End gangsters; even competing versions of himself. Shifting from Hackney to Hastings and all places in-between, while dissecting a man's fractured psyche piece by piece, Dining on Stones is a puzzle and a quest - for both writer and reader. 'Exhilarating, wonderfully funny, greatly unsettling - Sinclair on top form' Daily Telegraph 'Prose of almost incantatory power, cut with Chandleresque pithiness' Sunday Times 'Spectacular: the work of a man with the power to see things as they are, and magnify that vision with a clarity that is at once hallucinatory and forensic' Independent on Sunday Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor's Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital, Dining on Stones, Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances.

Dining on Stones, Or, The Middle Ground

Beginning in his east London home many years before it will be invaded by the Olympian machinery of global capitalism, Sinclair strikes out near and far in search of the forgotten and erased. He travels from the mouth of the Thames to Oxford, crosses Morecambe Bay in the footsteps of drowned Chinese cockle pickers, and visits an Athenian, post-Olympics landscape of vast and deserted stadia. It is a story of incident and accident, of the curious meeting the bizarre. Sinclair writes of being a labourer in Stratford, of Orwellian steps to ban a book launch in a library, of the fundamentalist visions of J.G. Ballard. Stories of police raids and mass expulsions jostle with accounts of failed grand projects: the Millennium Dome, Thames Gateway, and numerous other half-completed, ill-advised or abandoned structures. Burrowing under the perimeter fence of the grandest of Grand Projects - the giant myth that is 2012's London Olympics - Ghost Milk is a road map to a possible future as well as Iain Sinclair's most powerful statement yet on the throwaway impermanence of the present.

Calling Time on the Grand Project

Ghost Milk

A work of psychogeography ; the author seeks to reveal the meaning of London as a place which is dwelled in.

9 Excursions in the Secret History of London

Lights Out for the Territory

Once an Arcadian suburb of grand houses, orchards and conservatories, Hackney declined into a zone of asylums, hospitals and dirty industry. Persistently revived, reinvented, betrayed, it has become a symbol of inner-city chaos, crime and poverty.

Hackney Novel: Black Teeth

In 1841, the poet John Clare escaped from High Beach Asylum in Epping Forest and, heading towards his home in Northborough, covered 80 miles. He was searching for his lost love, a woman already three years dead. Iain Sinclair sets out to recreate Clare's walk away from madness and to explore his own obsession with the poet.

In the Traces of John Clare's 'Journey Out of Essex'

Edge of the Orison

Reflecting on the nature of fiction and history, this novel combines a spiritual inquest into the Whitechapel Ripper murders and the dark side of the Victorian imagination with the story of a posse of seedy book dealers, hot on the trail of obscure rarities of that period.

White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

Iain Sinclair has been documenting the peculiar magic of the river-city that absorbs and obsesses him for most of his adult life. In The Last London, he strikes out on a series of solitary walks and collaborative expeditions to make a final reckoning with a capital stretched beyond recognition. Here is a mesmerising record of secret scholars and whispering ghosts. Of disturbing encounters. Night hospitals. Pits that become cameras. Mole Man labyrinths. And privileged swimming pools, up in clouds, patrolled by surveillance helicopters. Where now are the myths, the ultimate fictions of a many times revised city? Travelling from the pinnacle of the Shard to the outer limits of the London Overground system at Croydon and Barking, from the Thames Estuary to the future ruins of Olympicopolis, Sinclair reflects on where London begins and where it ends. A memoir, a critique and a love letter, The Last London stands as a delirious conclusion to a truly epic project.

True Fictions from an Unreal City

The Last London

Alchemy

Rachel Lichtenstein

Rodinsky's Room

A Gazetteer of Books, Lives & Brief Encounters

My Favorite London Devils

Here we find Iain Sinclair digging into memory to realize that a series of walks from Port Eynon Point to Worm's Head, in Wales, became bookmarks for the significant stages in his life. Sinclair comes to realize that the defining quest is for access to the Paviland Cave, where the Red Lady was discovered. Who, as it turned out, was no lady but a young man put to ground 36,000 years ago. All the threads of the story knot within this potent and still mysterious cavern.

Black Apples of Gower

The Lost Rivers of London

Swimming to Heaven

A London writer comes to recognise his growing obsession with the Ewyas Valley on the border of England and Wales. Ewyas has been the site of persistent attempts to found or imagine utopian communities, all fascinated by the mythology of the west: Anglican renegade Father Ignatius, hippie communes, Allen Ginsberg, Bruce Chatwin, teepee dwellers, mushroom gobblers, narco pirates.

Or the Imaginary Conversations

Landor's Tower

Kevin Jackson

In The Verbals, a long conversation mingling confession, memories and self-criticism, Sinclair lays bare the origins of these works, from the myths of Freemasonry surrounding his ancestry to his encounters with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, from his adventures in the film world to his bohemian life in Dublin, from casual labouring in the East End to esoteric studies of earth mysteries and psychothearpy.

Iain Sinclair in Conversation with Kevin Jackson

The Verbals

David Rodinsky's A-Z Walked Over by Iain Sinclair

Dark Lanthorns

Excursions to the Millennium Dome

Sorry Meniscus

London is a city of disappearances and fallible memories. Alongside the contemporary city, of noise and celebrity, is that other city - of the dead, the unvoiced, the erased. This text brings to light the fugitive scraps, ragpicker's bundles, faded newspaper cuttings and patterns in the dust.

Iain Sinclair

Books

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