Personality

by Andrew O ' Hagan (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2004

  $20.54

• Used

  Hardcover
  2003

  $3.28

  Maria Tambini is a 13-year-old girl with an amazing singing voice. Growing up above her mother's chip shop on the Scottish island of Bute, living at the centre of her family's dream of fame, Maria is an extraordinary girl making ready to escape the ordinary life. We first meet her amidst the faded grandeur of the seaside resort of Rothesay, with the Argyll hills and the Eighties in front of her, and behind her a long shadow: the secret story of her Italian-immigrant family. When Maria wins a national TV talent show she is taken to London and becomes an instant star of what used to be called light entertainment; she sings with Dean Martin and tours America, can fill the London Palladium, yet all the while 'the girl with the giant voice' is losing herself in fame and begins a private war against her own body. Maria becomes a living exhibit in the modern drama of celebrity: is it possible that she can be saved by love? Or is she to be consumed by an obsessive culture, by family lies and her number one fan? The cast of characters is so vivid and complex that they seem to encompass within their enthralling stories a portrait of a whole society, its history and its spirit.

• New

  Paperback
  2004

  $10.89

  Maria Tambini is a thirteen-year-old girl with a great singing voice. Growing up on a small Scottish island, she is ready for the big time and keen to escape her ordinary life. When she wins a national TV talent show, she becomes an instant star, yet all the time 'the girl with the giant voice' is losing herself in fame and in a private battle with her own body. Can Maria be saved by love or is she destined to be consumed by celebrity, by family secrets, and by her number one fan? 'An enormously impressive, frequently curious and consistently ambitious novel.' Sunday Times 'Personality plucks a wealth of literary art ...What he manages brilliantly is allowing us only restricted access to Maria's mind, so that the reader is put in something like the same relation to her as the sharkish agents and managers who suck her dry.' Guardian 'There is boldness and beauty in this finely wrought merging of mythical epic, historical resonance and contemporary detail, and it is emblematic of O'Hagan's wider ambition ...Few young novelists would have the nerve to undertake such a task and fewer still could accomplish it with such command, such grace, and such compassion.' New York Review of Books