Cold Water

'A beautiful debut novel... A real achievement... This is a wise and incisive first novel from a real talent' - ScotsmanWinner of the Betty Trask Award.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.

“Strikingly assured... A writer of unexpected sensibilities and uncompromising originality”

Guardian
Cold Water is a thrilling pleasure... I don't think I've read such a good début in years -- Alan Warner
Vivid and stylish and endlessly, surprisingly filled with perfect, unexpected images... a beautifully written book, utterly original and the most exciting thing to have been published this year... Fantastic Big Issue
A truly original new voice in fiction. Her bleakly poetic first novel has an atmosphere all of its own: melancholy and profound yet shot through with the urgency of life and love -- Shena Mackay

Gwendoline Riley was born in 1979 and has published three other novels- Sick Notes, Joshua Spassky, which was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and won the Somerset Maugham Award and, most recently, Opposed Positions.

VOTED ONE OF THE TOP FIVE FIRST NOVELS OF THE YEAR GUARDIAN 'A beautiful debut novel...a real achievement...This is a wise and incisive first novel from a real talent' Scotsman 'A truly original new voice in fiction. Her bleakly poetic first novel has an atmosphere all of its own: melancholy and profound yet shot through with the urgency of life and love' Shena Mackay Carmel McKisco is 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 reoccupations, for better or worse. 'Strikingly assured...A writer of unexpected sensibilities and uncompromising originality' Guardian 'Vivid and stylish and endlessly, surprisingly filled with perfect, unexpected images...a beautifully written book, utterly original and the most exciting thing to have been published this year...Fantastic' Big Issue

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