Conversations with Friends: 'Brilliant, funny and startling.' GUARDIAN

Gut!

A thrilling and touching book for many reasons: It shows Frances, a student and young writer in her relationships to and with several people and their impacts on her and her development and self-image. The story evolves via a series of events seen through her eyes, and many dialogues both witty and revealing.The turns and complications always remain credible and plausible and this also goes for the ending. The language is mostly concise and to the point, yet highly revealing if called for not only of the intellectual, but equally the emotional implications, with ample breathtakingly poetic language helping to underline the contrast between the cerebral-intellectual deliberations and emotional response and reaction. I would be hard put to say what I didn’t like, for me the book as it stands is highly challenging and satisfying on many levels as well as lovely and complete.The target readership? Well, the novel is certainly not of the YA-genre, yet even if one might argue that Frances is a student of 21, and the other main couple in their mid-thirties, the interest of the work cannot be pinned to a certain age group. The central themes of intimacy, detachment, and identity are issues and challenges very few can say they have put behind them once and for all, and the ways they are handled and illustrated in the book don’t appear dated easily.

Schneller Versand