A conversation with John Burnside requires concentration. In the space of an hour, he moves from the development of language in black ghettos in America to the wonder of his eldest son, Lucas, at clouds, to baseball and ice hockey, to fuzzy logic in computing, to studying moths. There is a sense, in the rush of expression, of an unfettered mind.

But there are also recurring themes in his work. Burnside is a writer who is at home among people and places that have been abandoned, physically or metaphorically. He was lost himself once, to drink, drugs and a feeling of desolation, as he revealed in sharp detail in his memoir, A Lie About My Father. The book, which won the Saltire Society's Book of the Year award in 2006, picked over his fractured relationship with his father and the spiral of descent he was cast into, including two spells in a psychiatric hospital.

His latest work reverberates with the bleak dread that often colours his fiction and, as always, it is leavened by the lyrical, smooth composure of the writing. Burnside admits that he is drifting away from poetry, for which he has won several awards, towards prose, particularly short-story writing (he is a regular contributor of fiction to The New Yorker magazine).

Glister, his new novel, is set in fictional Innertown, a small coastal community in the shadow of a chemical plant, which has shut down, but whose legacy lingers in the illness and despondency of the people and the land around it. A boy goes missing in Innertown every few months, never to be seen again. This provides the story's narrative drive.

Adults abandon their lives by suddenly packing up and walking away. They are the ones lucky enough to escape. Those who remain tend to be mournful figures who have folded in on themselves, like the father of Leonard, the book's teenage narrator.

In Glister, young teenagers observe the emptiness of the adult lives around them and strive for rebellion, often in the form of promiscuity.

“I was speaking to somebody the other day who's read the book and they said what was shocking was the way in which sex was used to express the desperation of these kids, and I said, ‘You've obviously not lived in an industrial new town,'” says Burnside with a laugh. “We always talk about people drinking and taking drugs at 14 to deal with things, but people f*** all the time for that reason.”

Burnside's favourite scene in the book is when Leonard is having sex with his girlfriend and a mutated, dying animal interrupts them. “It's partly based on a real incident, I should confess, which is terrible,” he says, grinning furtively. “Not the strange animal - it was a bird - but I remember that whole mixture of sex and the pain of the dying animal.”

Innertown was partly inspired by Corby, the Northamptonshire steel town to which many Scottish families moved in search of work in the 1960s and 1970s.

“I lived in Corby during the better times and the worst times. As hard as life might have been before, when the steelworks were operating you had work to do and some money, even if most of it was pissed up the wall.

“When people say the heart went out of that town or city, they're telling the truth. You take away that reason for being and the heart goes out of the people. It isn't just that you see more people doing drugs - it's the expressions on the faces and even the language that becomes hollow.”

There is little fear among the children in the novel, only a sense of inevitability. They roam the empty shell of the chemical plant like a pack of savages. Leonard spends time among the darkened trees of a wood poisoned by the plant. Man's effect on the environment is a Burnside staple. Nature's resilience, is a comfort to him.

“A lot of the trees are dead, but wild flowers poke up through the ruins of the plant,” he says. “Leonard sees beauty in this devastated landscape.”

There is darkness in Glister, but it is not overwhelming. The shadows, instead, serve to illuminate liberation - of people, of the soul, of life itself.

Glister, Jonathan Cape, published May 15, £15.99. Available at The Sunday Times Books First price of £14.39 (inc p&p) on 0870 160 8080, or visit www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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