Always attuned to the moment of epiphany, these
twelve stories are profound, intimate observations of
men and women whose lives ache with possibility - each
story a dramatisation of the instant in a life that
exposes it all: love and the lack of love, hope and the
lack of hope. These men and women are perfectly ordinary
people - whose marriages founder; who sit on their own
in a cinema watching a film with no soundtrack; and, who
risk sex in a hotel with an anonymous stranger. They
conceal tenderness and disappointment, vulnerability and
longing, griefs and wonders - and, with each of them,
Kennedy finds and opens up that extraordinary emotional
wound, that insight into their experiences: like the
woman in 'Saturday Teatime' who tries to relax in a
flotation tank, before her memories hijack her, taking
her back to last weekend's party - to a boy with a
hamster, and his lecherous father - and then further
back to another Saturday, when she was nine years old,
when the troubling of her life began. A.L. Kennedy's
fifth remarkable collection of short stories shows us
exactly what becomes of the broken-hearted.She reveals
the sadness, violence, hurt and terror, but also the
redemption of love - and she does so with the enormous
human compassion, wild leaps of humour, and the
brilliantly original linguistic skill that distinguishes
her as one of Britain's finest writers. |
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