A powerful genre-defying work from award-winning poet Robin Robertson which follows a D-Day veteran as he goes in search of freedom and repair in post-war America. Now part of the Picador Collection.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize
Winner of The Roehampton Poetry Prize
Winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

‘Bold, brilliant . . . this is as poignant and visual as classic film noir’ - Ian Rankin
‘An incredible achievement’ - Irvine Welsh
‘This book will shift something in your soul’ - Elif Shafak

Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can’t return home to rural Nova Scotia, and looks instead to the city for freedom, anonymity and repair. As he moves from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco we witness a crucial period of fracture in American history, one that also allowed film noir to flourish. The Dream had gone sour but – as those dark, classic movies made clear – the country needed outsiders to study and dramatize its new anxieties.

While Walker tries to piece his life together, America is beginning to come apart: deeply paranoid, doubting its own certainties, riven by social and racial division, spiralling corruption and the collapse of the inner cities.

Robin Robertson’s The Long Take is the story of a good man, brutalized by war, haunted by violence and apparently doomed to return to it – yet resolved to find kindness again, in the world and in himself.

NOW IN THE PICADOR COLLECTION

"Wondrous . . . Probably the best novel of the year" - Economist, Books of the Year

"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." - Guardian

"‘Absolutely stunning . . . his beautiful verse describes things better than any picture could . . . The language is astonishing.’" - Front Row

"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" - Scotsman on Sunday

"As a work of art, this dreamlike exploration is a triumph; as a timely allegory, it is disturbingly profound . . . One of the first major achievements of 21st-century English-language literature." - Financial Times

"This is a poem-cum-novel by Scottish writer Robin Robertson, the prize-winning author of five previous poetry collections, which is a cinematic road trip through America. It’s from the point of view of Walker, a discharged World War II combat vet. Rather than return to Canada at the end of the war, he drifts from New York to Los Angeles to San Francisco. There are flashbacks to the war but he basically walks through an America which changes around him. It’s an incredible achievement, showing how poetry can reach the parts narrative prose can’t." - Metro

"The beauty of The Long Take lies in Robertson’s seemingly effortless ability to evoke the magic of cinema on every page . . . One of the most moving records in recent times of human fragility, ambition, injustice, violence, and our deeply troubled path through cities and nature...The Long Take will be remembered for its unparalleled originality, and an uncompromising power of storytelling that transcends the boundaries of film, fiction and poetry." - Poetry Review

"Modern, complex, political ... The Long Take is very much in line with the tradition that inspired it, not least when Robertson emphasizes “the dead streets of Los Angeles”, and the possibility that the United States, with its hatred of the other, might soon turn fascist... The Long Take’s larger theme is the capacity of greed and politics to turn hope into despair. In this way, the poem speaks to the present as well as to the past." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"The Long Take, by Robin Robertson, is a narrative in verse set in the immediate post-war years in America, that is at once heartbreaking and bracing. Think of it as the best black and white 1940s movie you will ever encounter in print." - Guardian, Best summer books 2018

"Robertson has chosen a supremely uncomfortable, recognizable flashpoint in US history, an almost perfect mirror image of the nation today: crude, newly unleashed material ambitions mix with off-the-chart levels of fear and paranoia." - Sunday Herald

"Robin Robertson's wonderful new book is hard to classify. It would be possible to review The Long Take as if it were a novel, even a thriller of sorts . . . This is a poetic work in which human degradation is afforded fleetingly beautiful expression . . . It reads at time as a secular Pilgrim's Progress and many of it's sequences put me in mind of Denis Johnson's reports from the abyss of drugs and drink." - Literary Review

"A blisteringly beautiful vision of America rotting in the aftermath of the Second World War . . . Robertson's book is stylish, daring, high concept and amazing." - Evening Standard