Shortlisted for the Man Booker PrizeWinner 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 ShafakWalker 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