Description
About Writer
‘I do not have a future, and I do not want dreams. My dreams are stories, written by a machine. And I will not think of her.’
Luke Kierley has visited the writer and asked it to exorcise from him all memory of her. Now he has no idea who she was and he must try to find a way to live with a bleeding hole in his memory.
Told in a unique voice that recalls southern gothic, classic horror, and frontier literature, Writer is like nothing you have read before. JM Burgoyne’s debut brings her virtuosic voice alive in a striking and unforgettable meditation on free-will, love, and the lengths we’ll go to avoid pain.
‘A gothic western about a vampyric typewriter’ – delve inside Writer in the authors own words.
Advance Praise for Writer
‘Compulsive, mysterious and unique. Writer gives up its secrets piece by piece and doesn’t let go until the final page.’
Rym Kechacha, author of Dark River
‘The brilliance in the book is the premise it is based on: how far would you go to forget your pain? A brilliantly spooky and scary book.’ Mish Mash Masala
‘Not so much a novel as an incantation, an extended poem. At times it seems Joycean, but has its own accent, grammar, approach. There is a journey at its heart which the reader is invited to join. It is an invitation not to be resisted.’Christopher Bigsby
‘Part-phantasmagorical fever-dream, part-gothic-western quest, Writer is a high noon between Philip K Dick and William Faulkner with no less than a soul at stake.’
Ashley Stokes, author of GIGANTIC, Unsung Stories
‘If M.R. James or Edgar Allan Poe wrote Don Quixote and set it in the wild west, Writer might be the result. The language is rich, dark as a fresh grave; it has your hand in its bone tight fist. There’s startling image after startling hallucinatory images. Writer is a quest to escape the past drenched in blood-letting.’
Martin Figura
‘Writer is a slippery beast; a sliding puzzle of fatalism, nihilism, love, and the lies we live to avoid living with pain.’
Andrew Hook
Free Sample!
Listen to JM Burgoyne read the opening section of Writer in this advance preview of the audiobook to follow later this year. Featuring new music by Elizabeth and Jameson.
Or read these opening pages below.
Writer by JM Burgoyne - PrologueClick here to download this extract as a pdf.
About the Author

JM Burgoyne; credit Adam Barnes
JM Burgoyne is originally from Hertfordshire. She has a BA and MA from the University of East Anglia. She has had many jobs including administration, teaching, tutoring, community filmmaking, and journalism. She has also volunteered for charities from Ethiopia to The Jungle in Calais. Her key traits, she says, are an inability to work full-time without feeling trapped, and generally feeling bored of something after having done it twice. She lives in Norwich.
Writer Details
Paperback ISBN: 9781912665143
Ebook ISBN: 9781912665150
Published by Story Machine
Publication Date: 05/05/2022
Extent: 256pp
Format: Paperback Original
Planet Positive Publishing
Story Machine is committed to putting the environment first. This book is printed using processes that are:
Planet Positive Printing means that our books are a little more expensive than they would otherwise be. We believe that this is a small price to pay for the future of our planet.
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