Still Nurturing Her Sexuality, Despite Her Fallible Memory And Her Deteriorating Body.Claire Meadows, 92, Is Lying In Bed On A Sunday Morning, Looking Forward To The 102Nd Birthday Party Of Her Friend Martin In His Retirement Home…
Forthcoming in August 2024
Waiting for a Party leads us into the mind of an older woman, Still nurturing her sexuality, despite her fallible memory and her deteriorating body.
Claire Meadows, 92, is lying in bed on a Sunday morning, looking forward to the 102nd birthday party of her friend Martin in his retirement home. As she reminisces about her life, her thwarted ambition to become a concert pianist, her missed opportunities to have children, and her friends and lovers, mostly dead, she is troubled by the part she played, consciously or not, in the death of her husband. Was she responsible, or was it an accident?
This novel is in five parts: ‘The Eye/I or A Story to Love her’, ‘Acrobat’, ‘The Dead’, ‘The Suitor’ and ‘The Poet’, each written in a different style. While each part is self-contained, together they form a narrative whole, which is developed around the idea that writing stories about our ancestors is one way of discovering or fashioning our identity.
Erica Carter, Chair of the judges of the Goldsmiths prize:
Good Day? is a novel in dialogue that works with repetition and rhythm like a piece of music by Philip Glass.
Formally inventive, it is also elegant, compelling, and slips down a treat.
This is a collection of twenty short stories of different lengths and written in a variety of styles. Main writes about characters whose passion borders on obsession and who are seeking love and companionship but are doomed to remain alone, with their sense of personal failure as the only company.
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