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Guy Burt

@guyburtauthor

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Novelist and BAFTA-winning screenwriter. Author of The Glass Field. Sometimes in the UK, sometimes in Spain, always in my head.

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THE GLASS FIELD
A quietly unsettling novel about grief, intimacy, and what we reach for when the world feels close to breaking
Published May 14th, 2026 and available now. Link in bio. #literaryfiction #bookstagramuk #comingofage #contemporaryfiction #psychologicalfiction by @guyburtauthor

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5 months ago

The Glass Field began with a different title, a different central character, and a different story. In many ways it wasn't the same book at all; but there was a core that sustained across five major redrafts (and a host of minor ones). Here, just for fun, is the first page of every major version of the novel. #literaryfiction #bookstagramuk #psychologicalfiction #contemporaryfiction #writersofinstagram by @guyburtauthor

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4 months ago

A group teenagers lock themselves into a forgotten bunker. They bring sleeping bags, tinned food, bottles of booze. Three days later, things turn ugly. Not everyone gets out alive.

That’s the premise of my first novel, After the Hole, which was published in 1993 (and, later, filmed as The Hole, starring Thora Birch and Keira Knightley.)

33 years later, in The Glass Field, two teenagers, Scott and Jodie, find a forgotten bunker. They stock it to survive nuclear war. They, too, take sleeping bags, tinned food; bottles of iodine solution to counter the radiation.

Two novels. Teenagers in a bunker, both times.

I did have a nasty moment of wondering, Wait. Is this the only novel I have?

I’ve written the full story of this moment – and the answers I came to – in an essay on Substack, where I’m writing slightly longer posts about writing and reading. Link in bio, if you’d like to check it out.

#literaryfiction #bookstagramuk #contemporaryfiction #readersofinstagram #fictionlover @substack by @guyburtauthor

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2 months ago

Along the journey of this book, several characters fell by the wayside. Jeremy began with an entire story arc of his own: a mid-life crisis, a retreat into a strange experiment involving sound and silence, the beginnings of a reawakening. I was initially very taken with him and his story and it was a nice challenge to write such an insular, academic character: it let me adopt a voice, in the book, that no-one else had.

Gradually I became more and more aware that Jeremy was dragging things down. His passivity, insularity and dry academic tone were at odds with the voices of the younger characters; increasingly, they were also at odds with the urgency of the book.

I didn’t cut him entirely. He is still Scott’s dad, and he still plays an essential part in the novel. But we have far less of his inner life: we see him through Scott and Jodie, and he’s better that way. I like to think that the work I did on him – and it was a lot of work – wasn’t wasted; that it helped inform the character who we meet, more briefly, on the page.

I’ve written a bit more about this on Substack in the essay “Seven Years, Five Drafts”, if you fancy checking that out.

#literaryfiction #bookstagramuk #comingofage #booknerd #fictionlover by @guyburtauthor

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6 days ago

Before we moved to Spain we were living in London, and the view from my writing spot was basically a room full of personal clutter. I was fond of the clutter but it was also quite an insular space. Now, the view from my writing spot is a window: palm trees, the city, a lot of light.

I’m wondering if I’d have naturally have gravitated towards concrete bunkers and sealed spaces so much if I’d had this view in front of me when I started on The Glass Field. I’m also wondering what effect it’s having on the work I’m doing at the moment. Shit, maybe I’ll actually change and grow? 🤔 I’ll keep you posted.

#literaryfiction #bookstagramuk #contemporaryfiction #readersofinstagram #fictionlover by @guyburtauthor

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13 days ago

It’s been wonderful hearing what readers respond to most in The Glass Field. Here are a few comments about the themes that people say have resonated with them.

If this sounds like your kind of book, you can buy it through the link in my bio. I’d love to hear what you think.

#literaryfiction #bookstagramUK #contemporaryfiction #readersofinstagram #fictionlover by @guyburtauthor

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21 days ago

I’ve been thinking a lot about liminal spaces and how important they are to my writing. The fallout shelters and nuclear bunkers that I’ve been photographing and posting here are full of silent threat, but there are quieter and less obvious kinds of liminal space that are equally or more affecting. I remember when I was a kid that it was derelict places and abandoned places that had the biggest hold on my imagination, and I seem to keep coming back to that. (I can feel an essay coming on about this; I'll keep you posted.)

This preoccupation also seems to intersect with being interested in teenage characters, since teenagers occupy a liminal position between childhood and adulthood. Liminal characters inhabiting liminal space. It’s good to have obsessions.

#literaryfiction #bookstagramuk #comingofage #contemporaryfiction #readersofinstagram by @guyburtauthor

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a month ago

Something I’ve realised I genuinely care about is writing literary fiction characters who are not typical literary fiction types. Because WHERE ARE ALL THE GEEKS???

Think about the serious literary novels you’ve read recently. How many protagonists are writers, academics, teachers, musicians, historians, artists? (My guess: it’s a lot of them.)

Now imagine someone just as intelligent and obsessive and curious, except they’re into programming or sci fi or computers.

If you’re writing modern poetry while possessing an extraordinary knowledge of 18th-century literature, you’re an intellectual. If you’re coding a virtual world in C++ while possessing an extraordinary knowledge of AD&D or Doctor Who, you’re a nerd.

Why does one kind of knowledge get treated as a literary window into the human condition, while the other gets played for laughs?

I've written a Substack essay (rant?) on this. There’s a link in the bio.

This is why Jodie is quietly programming her own version of ELIZA in 1986, and Scott is reading Heinlein and Dredd instead of Henry James.

If you consider yourself a geek, I’d genuinely love to know what you think. Drop me a comment here, or hop on over to Substack to read the full thing.

#literaryfiction #nerdculture #nerdgirl #bookstagramuk #comingofage by @guyburtauthor

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a month ago

I wanted to share some of the things that readers are saying about The Glass Field.

If this sounds like your kind of book, you can buy it through the link in my bio. I’d love to hear what you think.

#literaryfiction #bookstagramuk #contemporaryfiction #fictionlover #readersofinstagram by @guyburtauthor

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2 months ago

Research for the character of Jodie was very different to the work I did on Scott. In effect, it was an excuse to revisit my own deeply geeky adolescence: the early days of the internet (bulletin boards, dial-up modems, Arpanet); personal computers of the 1980s (I cut my teeth on the ZX80 and ZX81 before moving on to the Commodore 64 and then the Atari ST, but Jodie has a posh IBM, which I never had the funds for); all kinds of early-days nerd stuff, before nerd stuff became cool and then mainstream.

It’s actually quite hard to characterise this as ‘research’. Honestly, most of it was just an enormous nostalgia trip through territory I already knew pretty well. The more difficult research I did into Jodie was around the subject of self-harm, about which I read extensively – including a lot of first-hand accounts. Most of this reading was online, though, so it’s not represented here. It’s a tough subject to include in a work of fiction, and the more vital to get right because of how damaging it is to real people, some of whom may end up being your readers; so I tried very hard to tackle it from Jodie’s own perspective, without showing the author’s hand.

I’ve written in more depth about the process of research, and how it can hijack and derail a novel, in an essay on Substack: link in bio.

#literaryfiction #bookstagramuk #comingofage #psychologicalfiction #readersofinstagram by @guyburtauthor

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2 months ago

Places, and the emotional weight they carry, are almost as important as characters to me: they’re not just the background atmosphere of the story, they’re an active element working on the characters. Places have a kind of pressure, and once I feel I know what it is, I can use it in service of the story.

The two key places of The Glass Field are the Heights, the suburban residential enclave in which Scott and Jodie live, and the abandoned army bunker they discover on the heathland up behind their houses. What’s strange to me is that the Heights feels almost more claustrophobic than the cramped concrete space of the bunker. There’s an inversion here. The Heights is where the characters are scrutinised, judged, victimised; it’s where the pressure builds until it’s intolerable. The bunker, by contrast, is where they have the chance to feel free.

#literaryfiction #bookstagramuk #comingofage #psychologicalfiction #contemporaryfiction by @guyburtauthor

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2 months ago

Although the themes and setting of The Glass Field are very personal, and therefore familiar, I still did a lot of research for each character – partly to try to make sure that I didn’t get anything factual wrong, but more because reading around the characters and their preoccupations helped deepen them in my mind. Spending a day reading exclusively about Scott’s interests would stir my imagination of him as a person, and I’d always end the research session with a better understanding of who he was.

Scott’s obsession with nuclear war led me to read widely on nuclear near-miss accidents: these are the ‘what if?’ moments which haunt him, playing a sickening, real-world counterpoint to the more typically adolescent comics and apocalypse fiction that he reads. I think it’s through his private reactions to these stories that we really see Scott’s vulnerability.

And, because he’s also tangentially involved with activism and protest, through the Music Box and Charlie (possibly my favourite secondary character in the novel), I suppressed a shudder and refreshed my memory of what life was like in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain in 1986.

#literaryfiction #bookstagramuk #comingofage #contemporaryfiction #fictionlover by @guyburtauthor

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3 months ago