SO I AM GLAD

Literature & Fiction

KENNEDY,A.L.

Contemporary

TRAFALGAR SQUARE +

What Becomes

Twice selected for Granta’s list of Best Young British Novelists, winner of the 2007 Costa Book Award for her acclaimed novel Day (“Day is a novel of extraordinary complexity”—The New York Review of Books), which was also chosen as one of New York magazine’s top ten books of the year—the internationally revered A. L. Kennedy returns with a story collection whose glorious wit and vitality make this a not-to-be-missed addition to the canon of one of our most formidable young writers.No one captures the spirit of our times like A. L. Kennedy, with her dark humor, poignant hopefulness, and brilliant evocation of contemporary social and spiritual malaise. In the title story, a man abandons his indifferent wife and wanders into a small-town movie theater where he finds himself just as invisible as he was at home. In the masterfully comic “Saturday Teatime,” a woman trying to relax in a flotation tank is hijacked by memories of her past. In “Whole Family with Young Children Devastated,” a woman, inadvertently drawn into a stranger’s marital dysfunction, meditates on the failings of modern life as seen through late-night television and early-morning walks. Powerful and funny, intimate and profound, the stories in What Becomes are further proof that Kennedy is one of the most dazzling and inventive writers of her generation.

Vintage

Useful for readers and aspiring writers, this book contains what they need to know about the complexities of researching, writing and publishing fiction. It features essays on character, voice, writers' workshops and writers' health.

On Writing

History & Criticism

Vintage Publications

Nathan Staples is a man in pain, consumed by loathing and love in roughly equal measures. Frustrated and appalled by his life and the way he lives it, he is sustained only by his passionate devotion to his estranged wife, Maura, and their teenage daughter, Mary—whom he hasn’t seen in fifteen years, and who thinks he’s dead. When Nathan contrives to have Mary invited to the island where he lives in retreat, he sets in motion the possibility of telling her he is her father, and of becoming whole and complete and alive again.The path to grace, though, is strewn with obstacles and challenges. The obsessive island dwellers are trying to cure themselves through trial by extremity while, over in London, Nathan’s editor, only friend and one link with his literary career—the brilliant, loyal, hopeless Jack—is drinking himself into the ground. And Mary is torn emotionally between familial love for the two uncles who brought her up in loco parentis and the beginnings of a romantic, sexual life beyond. With her new novel, A. L. Kennedy has written a work of something approaching genius—its surface bright with turmoil and damage, its depths profound and turbulent. A brilliant examination of human frailty, cut through with bitter, helpless comedy and agonizing grief, Everything You Need is a novel about a man who has nothing, a man who will be healed only when he finds the lost grail he once held in his hands: the ability to give and receive love.

Everything You Need

Vintage, UK

Everything You Need, the new novel by Scottish writer AL Kennedy, is the story of Nathan Staples, a self-sabotaging, depleted novelist who lives in a writer's colony where he dreams of reunion with his estranged wife, Maura, and his daughter, Mary, who he's not seen for 15 years. Nathan contrives to have Mary, now 19, invited to join the colony where he can mentor her literary progress without telling her who he is. Mary, an independent and open young woman, has been lovingly raised by an extraordinary gay couple and is more than able to withstand Nathan's bullying irascibility and possessive, confused desire. Kennedy brilliantly teases out the dilemmas and dramas of his subterfuge as he attempts to redeem himself. Nathan, Mary and the five other writers are beautifully drawn and their claustrophobic reliance on each other is touching, cruel and true. Kennedy has a delightful ability to stretch words to new effect. The expressive tenderness in her handling of love, loss and recovery is robust, bracing and sometimes quaint. As Nathan teaches Mary how to avoid his mistakes, how to welcome "the anxious flex of ready words", Kennedy is clever to steer clear of the hackneyed dangers of author-prodigy dynamics and swerves into murkier emotional scapes. Despite a baggy middle and an underwriting of Maura, this is a splendid epic tale of the tricky and terrifying demands of love and of writing itself. --Cherry Smyth Nathan Staples is a man in pain: consumed by loathing and love in roughly equal measure. He is sustained only by his devotion to his estranged wife and their teenage daughter, who thinks he's dead having not seen him for 15 years. His path to grace is strewn with obstacles and challenges.

JONATHAN CAPE.

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. Each story in this mesmeric new collection is an epiphany, a revelation: eloquent, excoriating - saved from bleakness by humanity and humour - unflinching and unwavering in its scrutiny of desite and loss. Justly celebrated as one of the most original young writers at work today, A.L. Kennedy writes stories of such intimacy, such aching honesty, that they are impossible to forget.

Indelible Acts

Literary

Jonathan Cape Ltd.

The New York Times has called her “a world-class fiction writer.” One of Britain’s most iconoclastic and highly acclaimed young writers (“If you are at all interested in contemporary fiction, this is work you must not miss”—Richard Ford)—twice selected as one of Granta’sBest Young British Novelists, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, the Encore Award and the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award—A. L. Kennedy now gives us a brilliant new novel about war for which she is receiving the strongest reviews of her career. Alfie Day, RAF airman and former World War II POW, never expected to survive the war. He may not have even wanted to—choosing to be a tail gunner—exposed, alone and watchful for his skipper and his crew through night after night of bombing missions. Now, five years after the end of the war and more alone than ever, Alfie finds himself drawn to unearth those intense, strangely passionate days by working as an extra on a POW film. What he will discover on the set about himself, his loves and the world around him will make the war itself look simple. Day is a superbly realized, emotionally charged, deeply affecting drama about the violence of modern life, and the intensity and courage to be found in the closeness of death. Blazing with Kennedy’s characteristic virtuosity, wit and narrative invention, Day is funny and moving, wise and sad, a dazzlingly original performance from one of the most gifted writers of our time.

Day: A novel

British & Irish

KNOPF

Twice selected for Granta’s list of Best Young British Novelists, winner of the 2007 Costa Book Award for her acclaimed novel Day (“Day is a novel of extraordinary complexity”—The New York Review of Books), which was also chosen as one of New York magazine’s top ten books of the year—the internationally revered A. L. Kennedy returns with a story collection whose glorious wit and vitality make this a not-to-be-missed addition to the canon of one of our most formidable young writers. No one captures the spirit of our times like A. L. Kennedy, with her dark humor, poignant hopefulness, and brilliant evocation of contemporary social and spiritual malaise. In the title story, a man abandons his indifferent wife and wanders into a small-town movie theater where he finds himself just as invisible as he was at home. In the masterfully comic “Saturday Teatime,” a woman trying to relax in a flotation tank is hijacked by memories of her past. In “Whole Family with Young Children Devastated,” a woman, inadvertently drawn into a stranger’s marital dysfunction, meditates on the failings of modern life as seen through late-night television and early-morning walks. Powerful and funny, intimate and profound, the stories in What Becomes are further proof that Kennedy is one of the most dazzling and inventive writers of her generation.

Short Stories & Anthologies

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Books by KENNEDY,A.L.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by KENNEDY,A.L.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

SO I AM GLAD

What Becomes

On Writing

Everything You Need

Everything You Need

Indelible Acts

Day

What Becomes

Day: A novel

What Becomes