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The Girl Who Was Going To Die
  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407021430
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

The Girl Who Was Going To Die

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A brilliant novel that is both utterly of-the-moment and linguistically innovative.

Britain is reeling from reports of a terrorist bomb on a film set that has killed a hundred people and, possibly, the brightest star in Hollywood, Thomas Bayne. Caught up in the middle of the national mourning is Susan Mantle - a rather hopeless London tour-guide - who is seen crying on a park bench and is taken up by the media as a symbol of the blitz spirit, appearing on the rolling news with the headline 'beautiful but crying'.

She is crying, though, for other reasons: she's just been told by a clairvoyant that she is about to die. Reason and the real world are quickly relinquished as Susan is swept into a media maelstrom, becoming the baffled and increasingly unwilling star of reality TV. Buffeted by the demands of her new public, and her private terrors about her own mortality, Susan starts to lose control of everything.
  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407021430
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

About the author

Glyn Maxwell

Glyn Maxwell has written in many genres, but is particularly celebrated as a dramatist and poet. He has won a number of prizes for his work, including the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He currently lives in London and lectures at the University of Essex.
GM

Praise for The Girl Who Was Going To Die

(An) admirable literary experiment

Irish Times

A caustic and darkly humurous satire

Observer

Bang up to date and blackly funny

The Times

Both his wit and talent for compression are evident throughout this constantly funny satire. To say that he has a wonderful ear for dialogue is only the beginning

Times Literary Supplement

Flashes of genius

Sunday Telegraph

The characters who come across most strongly in this format are those who use self-parody as part of their presentation... The exquisiteness of that cadence is a reminder that Maxwell is also a poet

Adam Mars-Jones, Observer

The multi-talented Glyn Maxwell... As a commentary of our present media-spun plight, The Girl Who Was Going to Die is acerbic and unsettling, as a novel it is a daring medley of emotional seriousness and ebullient farce, satire and burlesque, postmodernist gamesplaying and Hollywood melodrama

Adam Thorpe, Guardian

There is much to admire in this book.... an ambitious undertaking...an invigorating experience

Literary Review