Peter Robinson

Chief Inspector Alan Banks finds himself up against a diabolical arsonist in this electrifying novel of suspense from New York Times bestselling author Peter Robinson.In the early hours of the morning, a man reports a fire on two old canal boats. One of the firefighters notices the use of accelerant at the scene and calls the police, but by the time Inspector Banks arrives, the fire brigade have put out the flames and only the smoldering wreckage remains. A body has been found on each barge, and all the evidence points towards a deliberate arson attack. One of the victims is Tina, a young girl with a drug addiction and a terrible past who had been living with her boyfriend Mark. The other is Tom, an artist who had been living alone. Now, with little evidence to go on and a number of possible suspects, including Tina's boyfriend, the local 'lock-keeper' who reported the fire, and Tina's own father, Banks must begin to delve into the lives of the victims, and to discover who could have wanted them out of the way forever...From the master of psychological suspense, Peter Robinson, comes a mind-bending thriller of secrets and murder.

För fyrtio år sedan lades den engelska byn Hobb´s End under vatten. En ovanligt torr sommar leder emellertid till att de bräckliga huskropparna träder i dagen - och med dem ett kvinnoskelett. Överkommissarie Alan Banks får, tillsammans med kriminalinspektör Annie Cabbot, den otacksamma uppgiften att identifiera den döda kvinnan. De fascineras av utredningsarbetet som för dem decennier bakåt i tiden. Vad ingen av dem anar är att en person tror sig sitta inne med lösningen på mordet, en person som hela livet fruktat att sanningen ska uppenbaras och som är beredd att ta den med sig i graven... En ovanligt torr sommar belönades med Svenska Deckarakademins pris för bästa översatta kriminalroman 2001. Den har även erhållit det prestigefyllda Franska deckarpriset Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policiére och Anthony Award. Peter Robinson född 1950 i Yorkshire, England, är en engelsk författare. Han lever sedan mer än 25 år i Canada. Robinson är mest känd för sina kriminalromaner med handlingen förlagd till den fiktiva staden Eastvale i Yorkshire med Alan Banks i huvudrollen, men han har också givit ut poesi och romaner utanför kriminalgenren. Han har genom åren vunnit rader med priser för sina böcker, förutom de ovan nämnde även Best book of the year av Publishers Weekly och Page turner of the week av People och Notable book av New York Times.

"The Look of Goodbye" contains Peter Robinson's poetry from his last half dozen years living and working in Sendai and Kyoto. Difficulties associated with having your heart in Europe and your life in Japan are explored across the shadowy terrains of a world grown decidedly more at risk, dangerous, and violent. The stays of love, friendship, family, place, and memory are tested by death, loss, and displacement; yet Robinson's poetry celebrates all that it can by means of the poet's rhythm, formal dexterity, and his eye for the energized processes of landscape and atmosphere. Composed at the same time as their author began to write and publish aphorisms, these poems show Robinson extending his range of subjects and developing the fresh directness with which he treats them. While bidding farewell to his Japanese years, "The Look of Goodbye" is as welcoming of readers, new and returning, as ever.

Talk about Poetry is made up of twelve interviews, conducted over the last decade or so for hard-to-find print and internet journals, in which Peter Robinson discusses such subjects as poetry and sexual violence, the balkanization of the art and ways to resist it, the techniques of poetry and how they engage with the circumstances of life, and the connections between his own poetry, literary criticism, translations, aphoristic writings, and ancillary work. He recalls the editing of Perfect Bound and Numbers, and the organization of the Cambridge Poetry Festival; he responds to criticism, praises fellow writers, has his doubts about some questions put to him, and much more besides. Talk about Poetry is not only a companion volume to The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson, published in June 2006, but also a reliably open-minded guide through the forest of poetry during the last thirty years. Peter Robinson was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1953 and grew up mainly in Liverpool. He has degrees from the universities of York and Cambridge, and since 1989 has been a professor of English literature in Japan, at present in Kyoto where he lives with his wife and two daughters. He was described as 'the finest poet of his generation' as early as 1983, and has since established an international reputation in many of the fields associated with modern and contemporary poetry. His many publications include Poetry, Poets, Readers: Making Things Happen (2002), Selected Poems (2003), the aphorisms and prose-poems Untitled Deeds (2004), and Twentieth Century Poetry: Selves and Situations (2005). In 2006 he has published two books of poems, Ghost Characters (Shoestring Press) and There are Avenues (Brodie Press), and two translations, The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems of Luciano Erba (Princeton) and, with Marcus Perryman, Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni (Chicago).

Peter Robinson's third book of literary criticism presents a sequence of chapters exploring ways that selves and situations interact and become imaginatively identified with each other in poems. Readings of works by Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, Louis MacNeice, W. S. Graham, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Curnow, Charles Tomlinson, Mairi MacInnes, Tom Raworth, and Roy Fisher share an interest in how poems can be both attached to, and detached from, the culture, society, and conditions in which they were written. These studies draw out and underline both the ubiquity and elusiveness of the self in the situation of the text. The poems studied here are also discussed as focal points for relations between readerly and writerly selves and their situations in and over time.

Published in the UK as Caedmon's Song, this is a gripping standalone thriller from New York Times bestselling author Peter Robinson.On a balmy June night, Kirsten, a young university student, is strolling home through a silent moonlit park when she is viciously attacked.When she awakens in the hospital, she has no recollection of that brutal night. But then slowly, painfully, details reveal themselves--dreams of two figures, one white and one black, hovering over her; snatches of a strange and haunting song; the unfamiliar texture of a rough and deadly hand . . .In another part of the country, Martha Browne arrives in a Yorkshire seaside town, posing as an author doing research for a book. But her research is of a particularly macabre variety. Who is she hunting with such deadly determination? And why?The First Cut is a vivid and compelling psychological thriller, from the author of the critically acclaimed Inspector Banks series.

When a wealthy accountant is brutally murdered in front of his terrified wife and daughter, Inspector Banks teams up with Detective Constable Susan Gay and discovers that the victim, a seemingly quiet family man, had been living a secret double life. Reprint.

As a young speechwriter in the Reagan White House, Peter Robinson was responsible for the celebrated "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech. He was also one of a core group of writers who became informal experts on Reagan -- watching his every move, absorbing not just his political positions, but his personality, manner, and the way he carried himself. In How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life, Robinson draws on journal entries from his days at the White House, as well as interviews with those who knew the president best, to reveal ten life lessons he learned from the fortieth president -- a great yet ordinary man who touched the individuals around him as surely as he did his millions of admirers around the world.

This collection chronicles Peter Robinson's sustained commitment to 20th-century Italian poetry, but also includes selections from his early involvement with Pierre Reverdy's work and more recent readings of Noriko Ibaragi and Ingeborg Bachmann.

Poetry, Poets, Readers is a defence of poetry against the protective moves which claim that poets never lie because they never affirm, or that their poems exist in a separate 'world'. These much re-iterated manoeuvres for safe-guarding poetry by banishing it from an active role in life can paradoxically go hand in hand with a poet's yearning for the authority of a legislator. Through detailed considerations of poetry by Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, and Paul Muldoon, along with sustained meditations on question forms in poems, the role of fact in fictions, the nature of literary value, speech acts and performative utterances issued by poets, the book sets out a fresh model for relationships between poetry, poets, and readers - one which allows the historical fact of poems having made things happen to be itself happening. Peter Robinson, himself an award-winning poet, explores what we do by imagining when we read or write poems. In describing how poetry, poets, and readers make things happen the poet offers us an invitation and implies a promise. Taking up the one, we find out how to keep the other.

For Inspector Banks and Superintendent Gristhorpe, the abduction of a young girl brings back dreadful memories of the Moors Murders. It was a crime of staggering inhumanity: a seven-year-old girl taken from her working class Yorkshire home by an attractive young couple posing as social workers. Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks feels certain little Gemma Scupham is dead, yet the motive for her kidnapping remains a mystery. No ransom is ever demanded, nor could Gemma's tortured, guilt-ridden mother afford to pay one. And when the body of a young man is discovered in an abandoned mine, slain in a particularly brutal fashion, a disturbing, perplexing case takes an even more sinister twist -- drawing Banks into the sordid depths of an evil more terrible and terrifying than anything the seasoned investigator has ever encountered.

The book contains poems about the pleasures and difficulties of late parenthood; about what happens to the life you have left behind when your life changes; about ways in which 'the coloring of the past' is altered by the unexpected course events take in the present; and about the ways in which distances of time and place can be overcome by memory and imagination.

Based on the daily diary Peter Robinson kept at Stanford Business School, and peppered with a cast of unforgettable characters and situations, Snapshots from Hell answers the perennial question "What is business school really like?" as it recounts the author's own precarious, exhilarating and sleepless quest for the coveted MBA degree.

In the Circumstances is a study of the way people other than their authors contribute to poems. Discussing work by Wordsworth, Browning, Hardy, Pound, Eliot, Montale, Auden, Lowell, and Hill, the book explores how other people's lives and wider circumstances can influence the textual contexts of the poems and be felt within the works themselves. These circumstances emerge in such things as allusions to political events of the day, the inclusion of proper names and, above all, in the citation or absorption of the words of others. The book asks how the poets themselves worked these circumstances into the fabric of their poems, and what bearing this has on subsequent acts of revision and translation. These are current issues: for all those involved with poetry, as readers or writers, this book will provide pleasure and stimulus. After his first collection of poetry, Overdrawn Account (1980), Peter Robinson was described by Eric Griffiths in PN Review as `the finest poet of his generation'. His second volume This Other Life (1988) won the Cheltenham Prize. With Marcus Perrymen he has translated the complete poems of Vittorio Sereni, a selection of which appeared in 1990. A new book of his own poems is due in 1992.