First Love
“At the heart of Gwendoline Riley’s short, dark, funny novel is a marriage in which bullying self-pity and perplexed self-abasement collide in a series of savage little jousts that ought to be unbearable to witness, but are in fact mesmerizing and perversely tender.”
New York Times Book Review
Catastrophically ill-suited for each other, and forever straddling a line between relative calm and explosive confrontation, Neve and her husband, Edwyn, live together in London. For the moment they have reached a place of peace in their relationship, but past battles have left scars. As Neve recalls the decisions that brought her to Edwyn, she describes other loves and other debts-from her bullying father and her self-involved mother, to a musician she struggled to forget.
Drawing us into the battleground of this marriage, Gwendoline Riley tells a transfixing story of mistakes and misalliances, of helplessness and hostility, in which both husband and wife have played a part. Could this possibly be, nonetheless, a story of love?
Praise