Veronica

Description

In this seductive and shattering novel, Alison and Veronica meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New York: one is a former modeling sensation, stumbling away from the wreck of her career, the other an eccentric middle-aged proofreader with a meticulous eye. Over the next twenty years their friendship will encompass narcissism and tenderness, exploitation and self-sacrifice, love and mortality. Moving seamlessly between the glamorous and gritty '80s, when beauty and style gave licence to excess, and the broken world of the decade's survivors twenty years later, Gaitskill casts a fierce yet compassionate eye on the two eras and their fixations. Veronica masterfully evokes the fragility and mystery of human relationships in a world where love is rife with contradictions. Evocative, raw and entirely unique, Veronica was shortlisted for the prestigious 2005 National Book Award in the USA.

Mary Gaitskill is the author of the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To (nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award) and Don't Cry, and the novels Veronica (nominated for a National Book Award) and Two Girls, Fat and Thin. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize Stories.

Gaitskill writes beautifully about the agonising emotions we often try to keep under wraps in real life. * Grazia * A sensitive, astute and uncompromising exploration of the beauty and ugliness of human relationships * Observer * Gaitskill is a formidably gifted, astute writer... * The Sunday Business Post * Gaitskill deserves some sort of monument [for this] beautiful, devastating new novel...There are paragraphs like poems in Veronica that lure you back, over and over. * Elle * Gaitskill writes so radiantly about violent self-loathing that the very incongruousness of her language has shocking power. * The New York Times * This characteristically oblique glance at the US fashion modeling industry of the 1980s is written with all the psychological kick that distinguished Gaitskill's last collection of stories. -- DJ Taylor * TLS Books of the Year * Gaitskill is enormously gifted ... [Veronica] is a masterly examination of the relationship between surface and self, culture and fashion, time and memory. * The New York Times Book Review * Both stripped-bare fragile and 'fuck you' tough. * Dazed & Confused * A sensitive, astute and uncompromising exploration of the beauty and ugliness of human relationships * Observer *