Very Cold People

Manguso, Sarah

£14.99

Acclaimed writer Sarah Manguso makes her fiction debut with an icy, furious novel about the way in which a society can ignore and enable the abuse of young women, narrated by the daughter of just such an abusive mother.

Out of stock

Publish Date: 28/04/2022

Description

‘I can’t think of a writer who is at once so formally daring and so rigorously uncompromising as Sarah Manguso’ – Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man

‘No-one’s there to watch her, so she just waits for the lights to turn on, waits to begin her performance.’

No-one is watching Ruth. She, however, watches everyone and everything, and waits, growing up on the outskirts of an affluent but threadbare New England township, on the outer edge of popularity. She doesn’t necessarily understand what she is seeing, but she records faithfully and with absolute clarity the unfurling of her awkward youth, under even more awkward parenting. As they alternately mock, ignore, undermine and discount their daughter, Ruth’s parents present now as damaged, now as inadequate, now as monstrous. All the while the Future comes towards them all, steadily, inexorably, for some of them fatally. And the fog of the Past and the abuses committed under it gathers, swirls, settles, intermittently clears.

Watching the future come, the reader of Very Cold People is immobilized, transfixed as much by the gross failures of the adults to be adults, as by the determinedly graceful arc Ruth’s trajectory makes towards an adulthood of her own making.

Financial Times Best Debuts 2022

Additional information

Weight 316 g
Dimensions 222 × 144 × 26 mm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Hardback

Pages

160

Language

English

Edition

Hardback original

Dewey

813.6 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K