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  • Published: 1 February 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409058182
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 352

Paradise




'A brave and uncompromising book that lingers in the mind, Paradise is A. L. Kennedy on top form' Independent

Almost forty and with nothing to show for it, Hannah Luckraft is starting to notice that her lifestyle is not entirely sustainable: her subconscious is turning against her, her soul is a little unwell. Her family is wounded, her friends are odd, her body is not as reliable as it once was and her drinking is frankly out of hand. Robert, a dissolute dentist, appears to offer a love she can understand, but he may only be one more symptom of the problem she must cure. From the north-east of Scotland to Dublin, from London to Montreal, to Budapest and onwards, Hannah travels in search of the ultimate altered state: the one where she can be happy - her paradise.

Paradise is a compelling examination of failure that is also a comic triumph, a novel of dark extremes that is full of the most ravishing lyrical beauty.

  • Published: 1 February 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409058182
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 352

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.

Also by A.L. Kennedy

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Praise for Paradise

A stylist of the highest order

Financial Times

This is a narrative that will not let the reader go - One of the most linguistically inventive and captivating British writers of the age

Observer

The book sings its encapsulated pain with the effervescent energy of laughter

The Times

Beautifully written...Her sharpest vision yet

Guardian

Gripping... Stylistically consummate

Sunday Times

One of Britain's most iconoclastic and fiercely independent talents, a writer who repeatedly tests our expectations... Compelling, even consuming

Daily Telegraph

A writer of great power and subtlety, a specialist chronicler of depression... alcohol addiction, yearning and loss

Sunday Telegraph

Every sentence of Kennedy's fluid prose is to be savoured... An unflinching book, elevated by the sublime quality of Kennedy's writing. Lacerating comedy is pitted against passages of sheer beauty

Independent on Sunday

Kennedy's lyrical evocation of the mind of an alcoholic draws on, and slyly subverts, a long distinguished tradition of hard-drinking narratives in Scottish literature, from Alasdair Gray to Irvine Welsh

London Review of Books

In Paradise, A.L Kennedy weaves her word magic around one woman's determined embrace of alcohol

Rowan Pelling, New Statesman

A brave and uncompromising book that lingers in the mind, Paradise is A.L. Kennedy on top form

Independent
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