Overview

Edmund Putnam, days away from the end of his 50th year, finds that his solitary life is about to change. The magazine to which he has given his best decades faces closure, and Edmund will likely lose his job this coming Monday morning. But before this fateful prospect can arrive there are others, no less daunting: a date, and a birthday. Putnam's great friend, Laura, worries for him. She is a decade or so younger, employed by the same magazine but with the prospect of escape; she has been offered the opportunity to leave the country and work abroad. But can she bear to take it? Meanwhile Putnam's father, Martin, has found a new lease of life. He has fallen in love with a waitress at a local cafe, and decided to rescue her from her brutish husband. Unfolding over the course of a single weekend, as these three drifters assess their fates and their futures, THE PALM HOUSE reads between the lines of modern life in a country slipping back into its past, and presents Gwendoline Riley at her heartfelt, bravura best.

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9781035021055

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Reviews

A novelist of uncompromising brilliance -- Olivia Laing * Observer * What a phenomenal ear she has, and how remorselessly funny she is -- Kevin Barry author of <i>Night Boat to Tangier</i> Gwendoline Riley's talent for making characters live, and her skill for identifying the essential moment, word or gesture, is immense -- Chris Power, author of <i> Mothers</i> One of the most exciting novels in years… Riley is as good at turning over our expectations as she is at turning sentences around… the final stretch of the book is so good its almost showing off, with comedy and tragedy side by side -- John self Gwendoline Riley can draw character like nobody else . . . Her prose is so sharp you could cut yourself on it -- Elizabeth Macneal author of <i>The Burial Plot</i> Achingly sad and subversively funny… I read My Phantoms with great pleasure. It's a wonderful combination of achingly sad and subversively funny, simultaneously sharp and tender, and always finely observed. The dialogue is pitch perfect. The relationships are agonising. It's a subtle book, with big themes lightly drawn and precisely rendered, about how to live and how to love -- Monica Ali author of <i>Brick Lane</i> A writer of singular vision * Guardian * Take up the gauntlet with Gwendoline Riley: it's worth it -- Alex Clark * TLS * Riley's novels get under your skin -- Alex Preston * Observer * Gwendoline Riley is a genius -- Claire Allfree * Evening Standard * Gwendoline Riley's unsentimental fiction hovers on the edge of comedy and bleakness -- Madeleine Feeny * Spectator *

Author Information

GWENDOLINE RILEY was born in London in 1979. She is the author of My Phantoms, which was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize; of First Love, shortlisted for the Women's Prize for fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for fiction; and of Cold Water, Sick Notes, Joshua Spassky, and Opposed Positions. She has also won a Betty Trask Award and a Somerset Maugham Award, and has been shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In 2018, The Times Literary Supplement named her as one of the twenty best British and Irish novelists working today.

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