Synopses & Reviews
One ordinary afternoon in a nameless town, a nameless young woman is at work in a benefits office. Ten minutes later, she is in an underground parking lot, slammed up against a wall, having sex with a stranger. What made her do this? How can she forget him? These are questions the young woman asks herself as she charts her deepening erotic obsession with painful, sometimes hilarious precision. With the crazy logic and hallucinatory clarity of an exhilarating, terrifying dream, told in chapters as short and surprising as snapshots, True Things About Me hurtles through the terrain of sexual obsession and asks what it is to know oneself and to test the limits of ones desires.
Review
“Glinting with pitch-black humour, Davies’s razor-edged style has a lucidity and ferocity that makes much ‘literary’ prose sound like soggy mush.” —BOYD TONKIN,
The Independent “Deborah Kay Davies . . . is a writer born to awaken us . . . Her gift is that of nuanced compassionate revelation. Here, the almost-incomprehensible is made palpable. The ostensible fact that it’s told to us by the victim makes it more remarkable still. Repelled, yet attracted, the reader is helpless. Nothing prurient is indulged in. Here and there, flit sprites of humour, making the darkness more intense. If darkness has brilliance, this is it.” —TOM ADAIR, The Scotsman
Review
“Brutal, funny, and exerting the sick fascination of watching a train wreck. One of those rare novels that is genuinely about sex, in all its irrationality and potential for self-destruction.” —LIONEL SHRIVER, author of
We Need to Talk About Kevin “A perfectly tidy, well-constructed life—complete with job, friends, parents and house slides into the gutter . . . An airy book, full of wonderful spaces. Why can't she stop herself? Is her life so worthless? It's the narrator's insouciance that draws us in, but something darker keeps us reading. We all know how fragile our lives are. You close the book and are relieved that her descent is not your own.” —SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS,
The Los Angeles Times “Glinting with pitch-black humour, Daviess razor-edged style has a lucidity and ferocity that makes much ‘literary prose sound like soggy mush.” —BOYD TONKIN,
The Independent “Deborah Kay Davies . . . is a writer born to awaken us . . . Her gift is that of nuanced compassionate revelation. Here, the almost-incomprehensible is made palpable. The ostensible fact that its told to us by the victim makes it more remarkable still. Repelled, yet attracted, the reader is helpless. Nothing prurient is indulged in. Here and there, flit sprites of humour, making the darkness more intense. If darkness has brilliance, this is it.” —TOM ADAIR, The Scotsman
About the Author
Deborah Kay Davies started writing and publishing when she was a mature student and taught creative writing at Cardiff University. Her first collection of stories, Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful, won the 2009 Wales Book of the Year Award. She has also published a collection of poems, Things You Think I Don't Know. She lives in Wales.