Nathan Staples is a writer living among other writers on a remote island, and his daughter Mary, who has grown up at a distance from him and begins moving toward the same dangerous, necessary territory of language, desire, imagination, and self-making. 

There’s a strong coastal/island atmosphere here — gulls, sea walls, weather, boats, bodies, withheld speech — but the real landscape is emotional inheritance. Kennedy writes beautifully about hunger, shame, artistic vocation, loneliness, sexual charge, parental failure, and the strange cruelty of teaching someone to write when writing is also the thing that has helped you avoid living properly.

A good one for readers of Ali Smith, Jeanette Winterson, early Ian McEwan, Deborah Levy, Scottish literary fiction, and novels about writers that are actually suspicious of writers.

Vintage paperback edition, published in 2000. First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1999. Full number line present. Good second-hand condition, with light shelfwear and handling. Internally clean.