A novelist on the ropes gets one last shot at redemptionβand predictably screws it up, right on cue. In this debut novel, Price offers up an acridly witty portrait of the artist in decline.
It turns out the aging pugilist of an author has been sent out on the unlikeliest of book tours for Without Leave , a memoir about his service in Vietnam. Lazar is met by his student escort, Vance Allerby, a shy wannabe writer whose life has been dominated by his depressed mother. Share your opinion of this book. Absolutely enthralling. Read it. A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits upβsorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year.
In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's , after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless.
They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive.
