Name: Cold Water
ISBN: 9780786711093

Gwendoline Riley

Estranged from her family, Carmel McKisco, a spirited twenty-year-old working nights in a dive bar in Manchester, England, finds herself taking solace in the lives of her customers and succumbing to her romantic daydreams, in a moving novel of self-discovery that is filled with unforgettable characters.

Cold Water

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

Reviews