Carmel McKisco is wry, volatile and full of longing: a 20-year-old working nights in a dive bar in Manchester, England. Cut off from her family, she forges odd alliances with her customers, daydreams about escaping to Cornwall, her own Elysian Fields, and nurtures mordant fixations on Tony, her charismatic ex, and Steven, her washed-up adolescent hero. As she spins out the days and nights of an unrelenting rainy winter, she finds herself compelled to confront her romantic preoccupations. Peopled with memorable characters and imbued with a subtle sense of raw loneliness beneath the banter and whimsy, this remarkable debut is as cool and assured as Carmel herself. Cold Water was chosen by the Guardian as one of the five outstanding British debut novels of 2002. "I wouldn't just recommend this book to friends, I'd buy it for them."—The Guardian "[Cold Water] makes you think of Denis Johnson or Anne Tyler ... effortless stylistic sleight of hand and vivid, tactile humanity."—Alan Warner, author of The Sopranos "Gwendoline Riley is only twenty-two, but her short, sharp prose sets her book apart from other coming-of-age novels."
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
"These days I try to keep everything remote as a matter of course. Just feel the warm rush of things washing over." Whimsical 20-year-old British barmaid Carmel McKisco wanders from one tenuous relationship and fleeting flirtation to another in Riley's first novel, about blue-collar life in Manchester and London. Carmel's wistful voice is punctuated by occasional bursts of wry humor, and it effectively carries the first half of the book as the narrator describes her on-again, off-again relationship with slippery charmer Tony. Carmel also muses on her passing attraction to a bar patron named Kevin Kinsella, as well as a hero from her adolescence who reappears in her orbit, a washed-up singer named Steven whose life has come to a dead end. The thinly plotted book loses narrative momentum, however, in its second half, meandering toward a predictable conclusion. Carmel's loneliness and her poignant-but never maudlin-dreams of a comfortable, fulfilling life are well rendered, and this might have been an intriguing novel if Riley had used those desires as a vehicle for a more substantial plot. As it is, the book has much in common with other belated-coming-of-age tales about twentysomethings adrift. Riley's obvious talent for characterization doesn't quite compensate for the familiar material, though it does make her one to watch in the future.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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