Cold Water
Gwendoline Riley
  • Published: 15 May 2003
  • ISBN: 9780099437154
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $24.99

Cold Water

Buy from…
Amazon Booktopia Dymocks QBD Readings Your Bookstore Abbeys Boomerang Find local retailers Find local retailers Collins Fishpond Gleebooks Harry Hartog Kinokuniya Robinsons The Nile Mighty Ape

'A beautiful début novel... A real achievement... This is a wise and incisive first novel from a real talent' - Scotsman

Winner of the Betty Trask Award.

Carmel McKisco is wry, volatile and full of longing: a twenty-year-old girl working nights in a Manchester dive bar. Cut off from her family, and from Tony, her carefree ex, she forges strange alliances with her customers, and daydreams, half-heartedly, about escaping to Cornwall.

Cold Water is a poignant picaresque of barmaids and barflies; eccentric individuals all somehow tethered to their past - not least Carmel herself, who is nurturing mordant fixations on both her lost love, Tony, and her washed-up adolescent hero: a singer from Macclesfield. As she spins out the days and nights of an unrelentingly rainy winter she finds herself compelled to confront her romantic preoccupations, for better or worse.
  • Published: 15 May 2003
  • ISBN: 9780099437154
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

About the author

Gwendoline Riley

Gwendoline Riley was born in 1979 and has published four novels: Cold Water, which won a Betty Trask Award, Sick Notes, Joshua Spassky, which was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and won the Somerset Maugham Award, and Opposed Positions.

portrait photo of Gwendoline Riley

Also by Gwendoline Riley

Opposed Positions
Joshua Spassky
Sick Notes
See all

Praise for Cold Water

Strikingly assured... A writer of unexpected sensibilities and uncompromising originality

Guardian

Cold Water is a thrilling pleasure... I don't think I've read such a good début in years

Alan Warner

Vivid and stylish and endlessly, surprisingly filled with perfect, unexpected images... a beautifully written book, utterly original and the most exciting thing to have been published this year... Fantastic

Big Issue

A truly original new voice in fiction. Her bleakly poetic first novel has an atmosphere all of its own: melancholy and profound yet shot through with the urgency of life and love

Shena Mackay
penguin pop image
penguin pop image