A freezing room in a student house, a sagging mattress on the floor, and two people, one nineteen, the other twenty, kissing passionately. All night. It is to this scene that, twenty years later, Rosy, the narrator of Julie Myerson's astonishing new novel, returns obsessively. She has just lost a child in a terrible, careless accident, and Tom, her partner, has taken her to Paris to forget about things, to start again. It has snowed in the night and, waking at dawn, Rosy decides to go for a walk. At the hotel desk there's a note for her: 'I'm waiting for you X.' And he is, sitting in the corner of a cafe she enters almost at random. They talk. He touches her. She turns away and when she looks again he is gone. Was he there? Had she dreamed him? And why, when he emails her out of the blue two days later, does he write as though they haven't met for twenty years?
Julie Myerson is the author of Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House and nine novels, including the best-selling Something Might Happen, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. In the words of the Observer, she 'has a talent for making the unthinkable readable. The results are riveting.'
Title: The Story of You
Author: Julie Myerson
ISBN: 9780099497097
Binding:
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Publication Date: 2007-05-03
Number of Pages: 320
Weight: 0.2223 kg
Grief isn't normally the stuff of page-turners but Myerson, in stark, simple prose - seemingly effortless, though I suspect far from it - has constructed a compelling thriller out of it... A terrific read -- John Harding * Daily Mail *
Achingly brilliant...a haunting and compelling tale of memory, grief and obsession * Sunday Express *
A powerful, moving study of sadness and the uncanny -- Ludovic Hunter-Tilney * Financial Times *
Will haunt you to the last page * Scotsman *
This is an extraordinary, peculiar, mesmerising novel - the collected wail of middle-aged female anguish is brilliantly articulated. Myerson is one the select few who can write convincingly about a passionate love affair, with all its exquisite pains and barbed pleasures * New Statesman *