Gwendoline Riley

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.

My Phantoms

Rendered in dazzling prose, First Love is an account of the relationship between two catastrophically ill-suited people walking a precarious line between relative calm and explosive confrontation.

A Novel

First Love

An electric, compelling, often painfully funny portrait of family relationships, which shows the damage we can do in the course of a life.

A hostile mother-daughter relationship stands at the center of this astonishing, blackly humorous novel by the acclaimed author of First Love. Helen Grant is a mystery to her daughter. An extrovert with few friends who has sought intimacy in the wrong places, a twice-divorced mother of two now living alone surrounded by her memories, Helen (known to her acquaintances as “Hen”) has always haunted Bridget. Now, Bridget is an academic in her forties. She sees Helen once a year, and considers the problem to be contained. As she looks back on their tumultuous relationship—the performances and small deceptions—she tries to reckon with the cruelties inflicted on both sides. But when Helen makes it clear that she wants more, it seems an old struggle will have to be replayed. From the prize-winning author of First Love, My Phantoms is a bold, heart-stopping portrayal of a failed familial bond, which brings humor, subtlety, and new life to the difficult terrain of mothers and daughters.

A raw and engrossing portrait of familial and marital dysfunction by “one of Britain’s most original young writers” (The Observer). Neve is a writer in her mid-thirties married to an older man, Edwyn. For now they are in a place of relative peace, but their past battles have left scars. As Neve recalls the decisions that led her to this marriage, she tells of other loves and other debts, from her bullying father and her self-involved mother to a musician who played her and a series of lonely flights from place to place. Drawing the reader into the battleground of her relationship, Neve spins a story of helplessness and hostility, an ongoing conflict in which both husband and wife have played a part. But is this, nonetheless, also a story of love?

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. 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.

Cold Water

Laura Miller and Edmund Putnam have been friends for a long time. Theirs is a happy meeting of minds, with long evenings spent huddled in an ancient pub by the Thames, where they share office gossip, reflect on their teenage passions, and lament the state of the world.

Recently, though, Putnam has been harder to reach: He has lost his father, and the magazine to which he has dedicated his life has been hijacked by an insufferable new editor, Simon “call me Shove” Halfpenny.

Laura has her own problems: Living in London, a beautiful but also indifferent city, with a prickly mother to manage and a tricky past to contemplate, she finds that day-to-day life presents its difficulties. And as Putnam starts to sink into despondency, she must try to bring him back.

A novel of enduring friendships and small mercies, The Palm House offers us Gwendoline Riley’s trademark keen observation and wit, and leaves us with a sense of possibility.

The Palm House

At thirty, Aislinn Kelly is an occasional novelist with a near-morbid attunement to the motives of those around her. 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. There are sharp memories to contend with as the summer heats up, and not least regarding her family history, now revealed as so botched and pitiful it seems it might yet cancel her out. She's spent years evading the attentions of her unstable, bullying father, only to find her mother now cowering in a second rancid marriage. There are also friendships lost or ailing: with bibulous playwright Karl, sly poet Erwin, depressed bookshop-wallah Bronagh, and Aislinn's best friend Cathy, who has recently found God... Finally her thoughts turn to her last encounter with Jim Schmidt, a man she's loved for ten years, hasn't seen for five, yet still has to consider her opposite number in life. Opposed Positions is a startlingly frank novel about the human predicament, about love and its substitutes, disgraceful or otherwise. Some of these people want to be free - of themselves, of each other - and some have darker imperatives. Wry, shocking, perfectly observed and utterly heart-breaking, the novel moves towards its troubling conclusion: a painful appreciation of what it is we've come from, and what we might be heading for.

Opposed Positions

From the author of My Phantoms and First Love, a droll and quietly evocative novel about work, friendship, family, and the path—so often muddled—toward finding one’s place in life. Laura Miller and Edmund Putnam have been friends for a long time. Theirs is a happy meeting of minds, with long evenings spent huddled in an ancient pub by the Thames, where they share office gossip, reflect on their teenage passions, and lament the state of the world. Recently, though, Putnam has been harder to reach: He has lost his father, and the magazine to which he has dedicated his life has been hijacked by an insufferable new editor, Simon “call me Shove” Halfpenny. Laura has her own problems: Living in London, a beautiful but also indifferent city, with a prickly mother to manage and a tricky past to contemplate, she finds that day-to-day life presents its difficulties. And as Putnam starts to sink into despondency, she must try to bring him back. A novel of enduring friendships and small mercies, The Palm House offers us Gwendoline Riley’s trademark keen observation and wit, and leaves us with a sense of possibility.

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. 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.

Joshua Spassky

The eagerly-awaited second novel from the author of the highly praised Cold Water, is a powerful and moving study of urban disaffection, female friendship and the longing for love and redemption.

Sick Notes

In her third novel, Riley charts the peculiar final reckoning of a highly charged romance, exploring the possibility of human connection as two young people try to reconcile themselves to all of life’s bad endings, and give some meaning to their mayfly existences.

Een vrouw reist een keer per jaar naar Liverpool om haar moeder, met wie zij een moeilijke relatie heeft, te bezoeken. Tijdens het laatste bezoek blijkt de moeder stervende te zijn.

Mijn fantomen

Paul Morley

Anthony Wilson

David Constantine

Shelagh Delaney

Clare Pollard

Michael Bracewell

Gerard Woodward

Tariq Mehmood

Michael Symmons Roberts

Amanda Dalton

Emma Unsworth

Tony Sides

Wayne Clews

Jeanie O'Hare

An Anthology

Comma

Hard Rain ranges over thirty years of Bob Dylan's recordings, films, and concerts to deliver astute insights into—and sometimes heretical judgements of—his prodigious corpus of work. This updated edition includes a new epilogue that examines Dylan's thirtieth anniversary celebration in 1992; his albums Good As I Been to You, World Gone Wrong, and Time Out of Mind; his 1997 performance before the Pope; and his 1998 Grammy Award comeback. The result is unparalleled rock criticism.

A Dylan Commentary

Hard Rain

Young, full of life, and deeply sceptical about the power of love, a woman from Manchester struggles to make it as a writer, while she moves through a series of failed romances that finally leads her to the possibility of the real thing with an American musician. Original.

Tuesday Nights and Wednesday Mornings

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. Instead she lives in her own head. Then she meets Newton, a care-worn American wanderer with a drinker's face and an angel's smile. Newton changes everything. But for how long?

Gwendoline Riley

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