Joshua Spassky
  • Published: 15 May 2008
  • ISBN: 9780099490692
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $25.00

Joshua Spassky

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'This is a young writer of immense promise' - Literary Review

Joshua and Natalie share a vexed five-year history of sporadic encounters, explosive drunkenness and failed intercourse, spliced with sad intimations of true love. Natalie is attempting to start a new life in Manchester, but when Joshua calls unexpectedly and asks her to meet him in America she knows she has no choice but to go.

Whilst wandering around the Blue Ridge Mountains or lying together for days in their cheap hotel room, they talk about their lives - about his ex-wife, and her dead family - and come to a surprising understanding.

Shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize.
  • Published: 15 May 2008
  • ISBN: 9780099490692
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $25.00
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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
Sick Notes
Cold Water
See all

Praise for Joshua Spassky

A poignant novel of attempted departures... To read Riley is to be trapped inside a consciousness whose self-pity, indulgence and petulance are offset by taut style, wry humour, exactitude of image - a consciousness watching itself

Anita Sethi, Independent

Sharply written...An engaging read

Guardian

A truly original new voice in fiction

Shena Mackay

It reads like a hit of espresso, a short intense experience that starts with endings and ends with a declaration of love

Herald

Riley's prose is as clear, sharp and sobering as her heroine's tonic water. Bubbles of bitter humour burst and repeat on the reader's tongue

Daily Telegraph

Riley writes with a Woolf-ish exactitude... A brilliant and beautiful novel

Kate Saunders, The Times

She is still at her best when she writes - with great verve and invention - about her home town. She takes the rain that covers Manchester like a tent. And transforms it into something beautiful

Times Literary Supplement
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