Opposed Positions

(A spare and stunning new novel from one of England's brig...)

A spare and stunning new novel from one of England's brightest literary talents.       At thirty, Aislinn Kelly is an occasional novelist with a near-morbid attunement to the motives of those around her. Isolated, restless and stuck, she decamps to America -- a default recourse -- this time to an attic room in Indianapolis, to attempt once again the definitive act of self-salvage.  There are sharp memories to contend with as the summer heats up, and not least regarding her family history, now revealed as so botched and pitiful it seems it might yet cancel her out. She's spent years evading the attentions of her unstable, bullying father, only to find her mother now cowering in a second rancid marriage. There are also friendships lost or ailing: with bibulous playwright Karl, sly poet Erwin, depressed bookshop-wallah Bronagh, and Aislinn's best friend Cathy, who has recently found God... Finally her thoughts turn to her last encounter with Jim Schmidt, a man she's loved for ten years, hasn't seen for five, yet still has to consider her opposite number in life. Opposed Positions is a startlingly frank novel about the human predicament, about love and its substitutes, disgraceful or otherwise. Some of these people want to be free -- of themselves, of each other -- and some have darker imperatives. Wry, shocking, perfectly observed and utterly heart-breaking, the novel moves towards its troubling conclusion: a painful appreciation of what it is we've come from, and what we might be heading for.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0099565196/?tag=2022091-20

Tuesday Nights and Wednesday Mornings: A Novella and Stories

( Plucked from the rainy streets of Manchester, award-win...)

Plucked from the rainy streets of Manchester, award-winning author Gwendoline Riley’s novella and stories explore the diminishing prospects of true love, the daunting face of God, and the aftereffects of too much time at the bar with a devotion she likens to “lying on a rest room floor saying the Jesus prayer.” In the titular novella, the centerpiece of the collection, we meet Esther, an emotionally capricious twenty-something, part-time struggling writer, and skeptical romantic. Esther loses herself on the streets of Manchester, her adopted home, and explores it with ritual fervor. Although her best friend Donna provides a steady source of emotional succor, Esther adopts a loner’s guise in the face of a broken home and a series of less-than-storybook romances. However, when a young American musician enters her life she comes face-to-face with the intimacy she so desperately seeks. Riley has created a cast of characters that embody both an enigmatic reticence, and a graceful emotionalism. Tuesday Nights and Wednesday Mornings confirms Riley as one of the most talented new voices in fiction today.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0786713267/?tag=2022091-20

Joshua Spassky

(In her third novel, Riley charts the peculiar final recko...)

In her third novel, Riley charts the peculiar final reckoning of a highly charged romance, exploring the possibility of human connection as two young people try to reconcile themselves to all of life’s bad endings, and give some meaning to their mayfly existences.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/022407699X/?tag=2022091-20

Opposed Positions (By: Gwendoline Riley) published: June, 2012

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B016GWBSQU/?tag=2022091-20

Opposed Positions by Riley, Gwendoline (2014) Paperback

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IGYWXN4/?tag=2022091-20