She deletes all the images and refuses to speak to Crosbie again. Yet, as she scrolls through 200 pictures of "girls in sports clothes and uniforms, blondes, brunettes, redheads", she realises the unbearable truth: the girls are not objects of observation, they are objects of desire. At first Liv tries to convince herself that Crosbie is merely "a spy, just like me".
She uncovers his secret: a computer full of images of girls between the ages of 14 and 20. Later, she creeps into his cottage when he is out, so she can rummage through his things. Liv strikes up a friendship with Crosbie, feeling pangs of sympathy and pity for him, and wonders if he is a "man without substance, not a ghost so much as an illusion". A foreigner arrives, Martin Crosbie, "around thirty. She passes the summer adrift in a dreamlike landscape: "the light was that still, silvery-white gloaming that makes everything spectral. Yet all her careful observation gets her is a series of "stories that no one could possibly believe".
There was no reason for any of them to die." Like her mother, a "famously reclusive painter" who "didn't need other people", Liv is a solitary, watchful woman, "one of God's spies". "The meadows were quiet, the sky was clear, and the water was still. A third, Liv explains, will also drown before the end of the summer a fourth man will disappear. Two brothers, Mats and Harald, are drowned. The action begins in northern Norway, on a remote island called Kvaløya, a place of "snow and sullen light" by winter, and "bird calls and wind-sifted murmurs" by summer. Though at the start of the book Liv is in her late 20s, remembering the events of a "strange summer" a decade ago, for most of the book she tries to reinhabit the mind of her teenage self. Glister was a horror-suspense-mystery narrated by a teenage boy Burnside's latest novel, A Summer of Drowning, is a horror-suspense-mystery with added elements drawn from fairytale, teen-angst novel and bildungsroman, narrated by a teenage girl, Liv. Prising it off may draw you into a realm of taboo and danger. Normality is a mask, to be worn for the benefit of others.
"Who wants to be safe? Who wants to be sane? Who wants to be normal?" he writes in the second volume of these memoirs, Waking up in Toytown. In his last novel, Glister, he portrayed the hounding of a loner he's also published two volumes of memoirs which convey "the loneliness of this guy – me". S cottish poet, novelist and memoirist John Burnside is transfixed by solitude, by outsiders and outcasts and how communities respond to those who fail to conform.
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