Author:Susannah Bates
Mel Ashton - hardworking and responsible - is tired of her image. Bored with her flat and exasperated by her job, Mel is thinking about making a few changes to her life. The only thing she's not planning to quit is her relationship with David. The trouble is that David - a talented artist - likes Mel just the way she is. He likes her rational approach to life. He is impressed by her ambition, and her calm presence provides the perfect antidote to his unstable intensity. With Mel, David is finally growing up - and he's even growing out of his adolescent obsession with women called Laura. Ten years ago David met an artists' model called Laura. But, intimidated by her beauty, he never approached her-and an obsession was born. A whole string of Lauras followed, and his perfect women was always a Laura until he met Mel. But Mel is changing. And when Edmund, David's elder brother, recommends David to his friend Joss, who wants a portrait painted of his new wife, David's relationship with Mel becomes more precarious than either of them could have imagined. For Joss's wife is the original Laura-
Alice Hoffman is simply brilliant
—— Daily MailA moving, poignant, powerful tale about love, death, friendship and family... Blue Diary gently gets under your skin. You'll be hooked
—— Daily MirrorAlice Hoffman writes quite wonderfully about the magic in our lives
—— New York Times Book ReviewLike her contemporaries, Carol Shields and Alice Munro, Hoffman has an acute eye for detail... Hoffman writes with heartbreaking clarity
—— The TimesHonest, shattering, seductive, and ultimately healing, Blue Diary is an unforgettable novel by a writer who tells "truths powerful enough to break a reader's heart"
—— Time'The excitement and disquiet gained spectacular, page-turning momentum...There are many highlights in Nicoll's sweeping and assured narrative...but the real star of White Male Heart is the Highlands...it is his supreme gift that he pulls this off on the page. He creates a backdrop so vivid that it becomes integral to the action...Meaty stuff indeed'
—— Scotland on Sunday'An explosively violent début...Nicoll reveals himself every bit as much a natural-born writer...lighting the fuses for his Highland Götterdämmerung'
—— The Scotsman'At once both brutal and beautiful...White Male Heart owes an obvious debt to Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory and a less obvious one to Andrew Greig's Electric Brae, both also remarkable debut novels by Scottish men, but Ruaridh Nicoll stakes out a corner of the territory that is uniquely his. The quality of the observation is breathtaking ...this is an absorbing and uncomfortable read, raising as many questions as it answers about what it means to be a young man in a territory where the roles are few and growing more limited with every passing year. But White Male Heart has far wider relevance than that. This is a novel that is both heart-rending and heart-stopping but which never loses sight of the importance of the blackest of humour. It is without question a welcome and worthy addition to the growing sub-genre of tartan noir'
—— VAL McDERMID , The Express
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