Book cover for The Long Take: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

The Long Take: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

Paperback

Synopsis

Details

21 March 2019
256 pages
9781509886258
Imprint: Picador

Reviews

The Long Take is like a film noir on the page. A book about a man and a city in shock, it’s an extraordinary evocation of the debris and ongoing destruction of war even in times of peace. In taking a scenario we think we know from the movies but offering a completely different perspective, Robin Robertson shows the flexibility a poet can bring to form and style.
A beautiful, vigorous and achingly melancholy hymn to the common man that is as unexpected as it is daring . . . The Long Take is a masterly work of art, exciting, colourful, fast-paced – the old-time movie reviewer’s vocabulary is apt to the case – and almost unbearably moving.
‘Absolutely stunning...his beautiful verse describes things better than any picture could... The language is astonishing.’
The Long Take shows it is perfectly possible to write poetry which is both accessible and subtle, which has a genuine moral and social conscience . . . This is a major achievement and will linger long in the reader's mind