The Long Take

Winner, Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
Winner, Roehampton Poetry Prize
Winner, Goldsmiths Prize
Finalist, Man Booker Prize
Finalist, Saltire Society Scottish Poetry Book of the Year Award
An Economist Book of the Year

Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can’t return home to rural Nova Scotia, and looks instead to the city for freedom, anonymity, and repair. As he finds his way from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco, we witness a crucial period of fracture in American history, one that also allowed film noir to flourish. The Dream had gone sour but — as those dark, classic movies made clear — the country needed outsiders to study and dramatize its new anxieties. Both an outsider and, gradually, an insider, Walker finds work as a journalist, and tries to piece his life together as America is beginning to come apart: riven by social and racial divisions, spiraling corruption, and the collapse of the inner cities.

In a journey that spans from Cape Breton to the beaches of Normandy to urban America, this is an epic for the modern world. It is a tale of damaged people trying to find kindness in the world, of cynicism and paranoia, and of redemption. Robin Robertson's fluid verse pans with filmic immediacy across the postwar urban scene — and into the heart of an unforgettable character. The Long Take is a genre-crossing work of stunning originality, beauty, and immediacy.