The Paper Lantern

The Paper Lantern is a novel by Will Burns that explores the impact of coronavirus on the English psyche and the loss of a sense of place. Set in a shuttered pub in the Chiltern Hills, the book charts the shifts in mood and understanding that have defined a transformative period in the narrator's history and the surrounding area.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 192 pages
Publication date: 09 June 2022
Publisher: Orion Publishing Co

When future generations come to ask themselves when England lost it and what it lost, they will pick up The Paper Lantern, a remarkable achievement in a book that feels at once timely and deeply considered. The Irish Times praised it as a book that speaks powerfully about what it is to be English and about the impact of coronavirus on our national psyche. The Observer hailed Will Burns as the new Defoe, while Adelle Stripe described him as the new Dickens. Set in a shuttered pub in a village in the very middle of the country adjacent to the Prime Minister's Chequers Estate, an unnamed narrator embarks on a series of walks in the Chiltern Hills. As he charts and interrogates the shifts in mood and understanding that have defined a transformative period in his own history and that of the surrounding area, he reveals a past scarred with trauma and a present lacking compass. Traversing local raves in secret valleys, to climate change and capitalism, The Paper Lantern creates a tangible, lived-in, complicated rendering of a place, at the moment when the very sense of place itself is being questioned.

Weight: 170g
Dimension: 214 x 128 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781474622035