Indelible Acts

Description

One of Granta's twenty Best of Young British Novelists in 1993 and 2003 The twelve stories in Indelible Acts are variations on a theme of longing - the unassuagable human need for contact, for completion, for that most fugitive gift of all: reciprocal love. Its characters' lives are thwarted, dashed, impassioned, each in their own way immolated by hope. A queue outside a cheese shop leads to a thrilling infidelity; a crematorium funeral exposes a love gone sour; a foreign hotel room becomes a diorama of despair as physical sickness becomes a metaphor for incurable grief. In the title story, two lovers confront their lusts amid the ruins of Rome; in 'A Bad Son' a young boy from a damaged home searches for some kind of peace in the newly fallen snow.

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards - including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in London and is a part-time lecturer in creative writing at Warwick University.

Brilliant... These 12 stories are among the most devastating you will read this year * Daily Telegraph * This woman is a profound writer -- Richard Ford An astonishing writer, with an imaginative empathy that seems to know no bounds * Time Out * These are powerful, intimate and angry stories. Kennedy writes with flaying precision about the things we won't often admit to ourselves, let alone speak aloud * Daily Mail * The clarity, wit and descriptive intensity of (Kennedy's) style are uplifting and the collection ends on a note of fragile hope... A writer in her thirties, who is becoming one of Britain's best * The Times *