Inglorious

Description

Rosa Lane is a fashionable journalist in her thirties, already the picture of a kind of London success. Her handsome boyfriend is something in politics and her other friends are confident, prosperous and ambitious. But one afternoon, staring at her computer screen at work, she fails to see the point, walks out of her job - and begins her long fall from modern grace. Within days, this smart, educated woman is dependent on the patience and charity of her friends. She soon finds that most of them, especially best-friend Grace, are far less supportive than she had imagined. What happens next is both comical and unbearable, as Rosa tries to find work, to demolish the great literature that she has never read (and never will), to appease her bank manager and to feel the excitement of a hopeless affair. When she visits old friends she descends into a pit of patronising, fecund domesticity. Meanwhile, her ex and his unctuous lover announce their marriage . . . This brilliant first novel is a razor-sharp portrait of anxiety and of mute inglorious urban lives. It is also a fine evocation of the city streets that this intelligent heroine walks and reads obsessively in her quest for some meaning in her life.

Joanna Kavenna wrote her first book at 13; inevitably it was appalling. By the age of 24, she had written 7 apparently unpublishable novels, as well as a doctorate. She spent some years trying to make a living by freelance writing, combining this with disastrous stints as an amanuensis. Eventually, exile seemed the best option, so she spent some years living in America, Germany, Scandinavia and France. This habit for nervous travel eventually produced her first published book, The Ice Museum. After finishing The Ice Museum she was living in Paris and London while she wrote Inglorious - her first novel.

"'This is a superb piece of writing, and a disturbing, witty commentary on modern life.' The Times"