'Patrick McGuinness writes of the other country of childhood with Proustian élan and Nabokovian delight.' — John Banville

In Ghost Stations, Patrick McGuinness writes about his own history, the unofficial histories of the places he has lived, and some of the lesser-known byways of European literature and art. He re-opens branchlines closed for 'efficiency'. He notices the extraordinary hiding in plain sight — in the local, in the mundane — and makes of it an act of resistance and modest, undogmatic revelation.

These are essays about what official history discards: the halt with no passengers, the language with no state, the town that was industrial and is now simply itself. Written from Caernarfon by a man born in Tunisia to a Belgian mother and a father from the Tyneside shipyards — and himself a translator from French and Spanish — this is a European book composed at Europe's edge, attentive to what is dismantled in the name of rationalisation and to what survives.

It will find readers anywhere a line was closed, a dialect thinned or a border quietly redrawn.