Gwendoline Riley Livres

From the prize-winning author of First Love comes an eviscerating account of a toxic mother-daughter bond, grief, and the damage done in the course of a life.

Joshua and Natalie share a vexed five-year history of sporadic encounters, explosive drunkenness and failed intercourse, spliced with sad intimations of true love. Natalie is attempting to start a new life in Manchester, but when Joshua calls unexpectedly and asks her to meet him in America she knows she has no choice but to go.

Carmel McKisco is wry, volatile and full of longing: a twenty-year-old girl working nights in a Manchester dive bar. eccentric individuals all somehow tethered to their past - not least Carmel herself, who is nurturing mordant fixations on both her lost love, Tony, and her washed-up adolescent hero: a singer from Macclesfield. schovat popis

Returning to Manchester, her broken home, Esther moves back to the flat she used to share with her best friend Donna. Surrounded by empty gin bottles, with her past life safely taped up in stacked cardboard boxes, she proceeds to turn her back on a 'real world' that seems meaningless and absurd.

Isolated, restless and stuck, she decamps to America - a default recourse - this time to an attic room in Indianapolis, to attempt once again the definitive act of self-salvage. Some of these people want to be free - of themselves, of each other - and some have darker imperatives.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017 and GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2017 - A tightly-wound, razor-sharp novel that questions our competing desires for intimacy and for freedom.