Opposed Positions
  • Published: 17 May 2012
  • ISBN: 9781446475010
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

Opposed Positions

Formats & editions
EBook
17 May 2012
Paperback
15 Jan 2014
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A spare and stunning new novel from one of England's brightest literary talents

At thirty, Aislinn Kelly is an occasional novelist with a near-morbid attunement to the motives of those around her. Isolated, restless and stuck, she decamps to America - a default recourse - this time to an attic room in Indianapolis, to attempt once again the definitive act of self-salvage.

There are sharp memories to contend with as the summer heats up, and not least regarding her family history, now revealed as so botched and pitiful it seems it might yet cancel her out. She's spent years evading the attentions of her unstable, bullying father, only to find her mother now cowering in a second rancid marriage. There are also friendships lost or ailing: with bibulous playwright Karl, sly poet Erwin, depressed bookshop-wallah Bronagh, and Aislinn's best friend Cathy, who has recently found God... Finally her thoughts turn to her last encounter with Jim Schmidt, a man she's loved for ten years, hasn't seen for five, yet still has to consider her opposite number in life.

Opposed Positions is a startlingly frank novel about the human predicament, about love and its substitutes, disgraceful or otherwise. Some of these people want to be free - of themselves, of each other - and some have darker imperatives. Wry, shocking, perfectly observed and utterly heart-breaking, the novel moves towards its troubling conclusion: a painful appreciation of what it is we've come from, and what we might be heading for.
  • Published: 17 May 2012
  • ISBN: 9781446475010
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240
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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

Joshua Spassky
Sick Notes
Cold Water
See all

Praise for Opposed Positions

Riley's appetite for risk-taking and vinegary apercus remains undiminished

Emma Hagestadt, Independent

Riley writes with a kind of defeated ecstasy

Leo Robson, Sunday Times

Scrupulous performance

Kate Webb, Times Literary Supplement

Although she works on a small canvas, Riley’s work is both intricate and expansive. Her prose is a continual joy to read, and the detail immensely satisfying: she can squeeze more resonance out of a misplaced apostrophe than others can from baroque, technicolour trauma

Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

Never less than enthralling

Bookmunch

This short novel laces its devastating observation of relationships with disturbing maturity. If next year's Orange judging panel doesn't take notice of Riley, it will have missed a trick

Elsbeth Lindner, Book Oxygen

Wonderfully spare lyricism and deadpan wit

Tina Jackson, Metro

The dialogue feels very natural and her use of language is sharp and precise

Robin Leggett, TheBookbag.co.uk

Icily impressive

Daily Mail

A short, sharp, shockingly brilliant peer down the pen of Aislinn Kelly

Dazed & Confused

Wonderfully spare lyricism and deadpan wit

Tina Jackson, The Metro

Riley's prose often sings, and there are moments of sheer dazzling brilliance here

bendutton.blogspot.co.uk

There was another brilliant curio from Gwendoline Riley, Opposed Positions... Riley writes cool, faintly autobiographical novellas about enigmatic young women who drift, think and write; she wears her influences (Woolf, Fitzgerald, Camus) with impressive insouciance, and this is one of her best

Justine Jordan, Guardian

[Riley] shows herself more than up to the job of writing the wasted hinterlands of the human heart

Anne Enright, Guardian

Clean, eminently readable prose and sometimes startling insights

Femke Colborne, Big Issue

The shifting, uncertain nature of human relationships – and their constant reinterpretation – is reflected in Riley’s understated prose, with moments of intense revelation thrown in like hand grenades.

Freya McClements, Irish Times
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