Synopses & Reviews
From a rising British novelist, an artful meditation on love and life in contemporary LondonWhen David Pinner introduces his former teacher, the American artist Ruth Marks, to his friend and flatmate James Glover, he unwittingly sets in place a love triangle loaded with tension, guilt, and heartbreak. As David plays reluctant witness (and more) to James and Ruth's escalating love affair, he must come to terms with his own blighted emotional life. Set in the London art scene awash with new money and intellectual pretension, in the sleek galleries and posh restaurants of a Britannia resurgent with cultural and economic power, Nick Laird's insightful and drolly satirical novel vividly portrays three people whose world gradually fractures along the ineluctable fault lines of desire, truth, deceit, and jealousy. With wit, compassion, and acuity, Laird explores the very nature of contemporary romance-"The Death of Love in Modern Culture," as David puts it in one of his dyspeptic blog posts-among damaged souls whose hearts and heads never quite line up long enough for them to achieve true happiness.
Review
"[A]ward-winning poet Laird has composed an unlikely group portrait with images and events moving at rapid speed, sometimes as blurred as the Tube rushing by." Library Journal
Review
"Another sharply observed book by a very funny writer..." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"By the time you realize just what a dangerous writer Nick Laird is, it's too late to break away....Under his gaze, the quotidian events of domestic life seem irradiated with wit. But when the story starts racing to its wicked conclusion, Laird isn't kidding. He's posing a thoroughly modern moral challenge that can't be laughed off." Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book World (read the entire )
Synopsis
When David Pinner introduces his former teacher, the American artist Ruth Marks, to his friend and flatmate James Glover, he unwittingly sets in place a love triangle loaded with tension, guilt, and heartbreak. As David plays reluctant witness (and more) to James and Ruth's escalating love affair, he must come to terms with his own blighted emotional life.
Set in the London art scene awash with new money and intellectual pretension, in the sleek galleries and posh restaurants of a Britannia resurgent with cultural and economic power, Nick Laird's insightful and drolly satirical novel vividly portrays three people whose world gradually fractures along the ineluctable fault lines of desire, truth, deceit, and jealousy. With wit, compassion, and acuity, Laird explores the very nature of contemporary romance — "The Death of Love in Modern Culture" — as David puts it in one of his dyspeptic blog posts "among damaged souls whose hearts and heads never quite line up long enough for them to achieve true happiness."
Synopsis
"Terrific. It's the kind of book Jane Austen would've written had she been male and hipper-and had Internet access." -Chicago Tribune
With his debut novel, Utterly Monkey, Nick Laird won acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic for his deft humor and sharp-eyed powers of observation. In this new novel, disaffected thirty-something college teacher David introduces his former teacher, American artist Ruth Marks, to his friend and flatmate James Glover, unwittingly setting in place a love triangle loaded with tension, guilt, and heartbreak. Set in the London art scene awash with new money and intellectual pretension, Nick Laird's insightful and drolly satirical novel explores the nature of contemporary romance among damaged souls whose hearts and heads never quite line up long enough for them to achieve true happiness.
Description
From a rising British novelist, an artful meditation on love and life in contemporary London.
About the Author
Nick Laird was born in 1975 in Northern Ireland. He was a scholar at Cambridge University, and later spent a year at Harvard University as a visiting fellow. The author of To a Fault, a poetry collection, he has received several prestigious awards for both poetry and fiction, including the 2005 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.