Cold Water

(Paperback)

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Description

Carmel McKisco is wry, volatile and full of longing: a twenty-year-old girl working nights in a Manchester dive bar. Cut off from her family, and from Tony, her carefree ex, she forges strange alliances with her customers, and daydreams, half-heartedly, about escaping to Cornwall, her own Elysian Fields. Cold Water is a poignant picaresque of barmaids and barflies; 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. As she spins out the days and nights of an unrelentingly rainy winter she finds herself compelled to confront her romantic preoccupations, for better or worse. Confident, fresh, and completely original, Cold Water has a voice to match - whether sharp or sentimental, tender or sassy, elegant or dryly sardonic. Peopled with memorable characters and imbued with a subtle sense of longing and raw loneliness beneath the banter and whimsy, this thrilling debut is as cool and assured as Carmel herself - a funny, memorable and strangely affecting look at the way people drift into and out of each other's lives, and how they find their place in the world.

Reviews

Strikingly assured... A writer of unexpected sensibilities and uncompromising originality * Guardian *
Cold Water is a thrilling pleasure... I don't think I've read such a good dbut in years -- Alan Warner
Vivid and stylish and endlessly, surprisingly filled with perfect, unexpected images... a beautifully written book, utterly original and the most exciting thing to have been published this year... Fantastic * Big Issue *
A truly original new voice in fiction. Her bleakly poetic first novel has an atmosphere all of its own: melancholy and profound yet shot through with the urgency of life and love -- Shena Mackay

Author Bio

Gwendoline Riley was born in 1979 and has published three other novels- Sick Notes, Joshua Spassky, which was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and won the Somerset Maugham Award and, most recently, Opposed Positions.