Description
Book SynopsisJoshua 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.
Whilst wandering around the Blue Ridge Mountains or lying together for days in their cheap hotel room, they talk about their lives - about his ex-wife, and her dead family - and come to a surprising understanding.
Shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize.
Trade ReviewRiley's prose is as clear, sharp and sobering as her heroine's tonic water. Bubbles of bitter humour burst and repeat on the reader's tongue * Daily Telegraph *
Riley writes with a Woolf-ish exactitude...
A brilliant and beautiful novel -- Kate Saunders * The Times *
She is still at her best when she writes - with great verve and invention - about her home town. She takes the rain that covers Manchester like a tent. And transforms it into something beautiful * Times Literary Supplement *
A poignant novel of attempted departures... To read Riley is to be trapped inside a consciousness whose self-pity, indulgence and petulance are offset by taut style, wry humour, exactitude of image - a consciousness watching itself -- Anita Sethi * Independent *
Sharply written...An engaging read * Guardian *
