Ghost Stations

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

Patrick McGuinness was born in Tunisia in 1968, of a Belgian mother and a father from North Tyneside’s ship-building community. His books include two novels, The Last Hundred Days (2011), longlisted for the Man Booker prize and shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, and Throw Me to the Wolves (2019), winner of the Encore Award; a memoir, Other People’s Countries (2014), winner of the Duff Cooper Award and the Wales Book of the Year; and three books of poems, most recently Blood Feather (2023). He has also written a book about the Oxford behind the university city, Real Oxford, several academic books, and is the translator of several books from French and Spanish. With Stephen Romer, he was awarded the 2024 Scott Moncrieff Prize for their translation of The Day’s Ration: Selected Poems by Gilles Ortlieb. In 2023, he was awarded the Prix Triennal du rayonnement des lettres belges for his contribution to Belgian literature.

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