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  • Published: 4 January 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409058151
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

Indelible Acts




Winner of the Costa Book Award, 'A. L. Kennedy is one of the most brilliant writers of her generation' Sunday Telegraph

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.

  • Published: 4 January 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409058151
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

About the author

A.L. Kennedy

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 Essex.

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Praise for Indelible Acts

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