“Intimately portrays connection in the face of destruction. Scott and Jodie are each scarred by life, but Burt refuses to let grim truths dull his story’s moments of sharp wit and tenderness. It’s a book that’s less about apocalypse than it is about the mythologies that one forges when imagining such an ending… A gripping read.”

– Kirkus Reviews

In the summer of 1986, Scott and Jodie are fifteen, angry, frightened, and increasingly convinced that the world is about to end.

Scott is haunted by his mother’s recent death and his father’s emotional absence. He becomes obsessed with stories of apocalypse, finding a grim consolation in visions of a world reduced to rubble and ash.

Jodie’s parents tell everyone she’s ‘much better now’. But Jodie knows this isn’t true. She has learned to keep the extent of her damage, and her rage, hidden.

Together, Scott and Jodie begin stocking a fallout shelter for the nuclear war they believe is coming. But as the connection between them deepens, it becomes harder to tell exactly what they’re preparing for.

The Glass Field is an intimate, unsettling novel about friendship, grief, fear and the stories we tell ourselves when the world feels close to breaking.

PRAISE FOR EARLIER WORK

“Spellbinding… deftly demonstrates that what lives vividly in one person’s memory can be erased or deeply buried in another’s”

– The New York Times Book Review

“Ambitious and substantial… This is a novel about first secrets, about childhood’s privacy and discovery. Burt’s great talent is to recapture their freshness and power”

– The Guardian

My debut novel, After the Hole, was published in 1993 and subsequently filmed as The Hole, starring Thora Birch and Keira Knightley.

Sophie, a psychological drama, was published in 1994.

The Dandelion Clock, a literary fiction novel exploring loss and love, was published in 1999. The US edition was titled A Clock Without Hands.