Pillow Man
By (Author) Nick Coleman
Vintage Publishing
Jonathan Cape Ltd
15th August 2015
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
823.92
Hardback
224
Width 162mm, Height 240mm, Spine 24mm
434g
An odd romance that begins among the Egyptian cotton sheets and goosedown pillows of an Oxford Street department store William has a good, steady job in retail. He works in the bedlinen department of an Oxford Street store. He knows everything there is to know about comfy. Lucy has a portfolio career which, in her view, is no kind of career at all. Her life is a mess, her love life even more unsatisfactory than that. She wouldn't be comfortable if she sat on a sofa in Heal's. Unable to sleep, she thinks a new pillow might be the answer. William and Lucy are not connected. Yet the pair of them share a terrible memory from the past, the sort of joint recollection that changes with the light, depending on who you were and where you were standing at the time. The question is- what to do with it Pillow Man is a London novel of our uneasy times. It has love in it and darkness. It sets lonely tunes to a broken backbeat. It marries life to death. Crucially, it explores the difficult metaphysics of bedtime. What, after all, do we really mean by 'thread-count'
Full of melancholy wit, its sure to beguile fans of Nick Hornby. -- Hephzibah Anderson * Mail on Sunday *
A quirky, well-written romance cum mystery tale. -- Sebastian Shakespeare * Tatler *
Coleman imbues his writing with a dry wit that enlivens the everyday, and with pithy character descriptions. * Independent on Sunday *
Sharp, witty and beautifully written, it only takes moments to fall head first into the beautiful style of Pillow Man. * We Love This Book *
A raw account of the male emotional landscape. -- Liza Hoggard * Independent *
Following a brief spell as a stringer at NME in the mid-1980s, Nick Coleman was Music Editor of Time Out for seven years, then Arts and Features Editor at the Independent and the Independent on Sunday. He has also written on music for The Times, Guardian, Telegraph, New Statesman, Intelligent Life, GQ and The Wire. He is the author of The Train in the Night, which was shortlisted for the 2012 Wellcome Book Prize.