A Kind of Intimacy

A Kind of Intimacy

by JennAshworth (Author)

Synopsis

Annie moves into her new home bringing little else but her cat and a collection of cow-shaped milk jugs. She's hoping for a clean slate, but there's something familiar about her next door neighbour - she's convinced she's seen him somewhere before. Annie is morbidly obese, lonely and hopeful. She narrates her own increasingly bizarre attempts to ingratiate herself with her new neighbours, learn from past mistakes and achieve a 'certain kind of intimacy' with the boy next door. Undeterred by her target's hostile girlfriend, she searches for guidance by obsessively studying self-help literature and romance novels. Though Annie struggles to repress a murky history of violence, secrets and sexual mishaps her past is never too far behind her, finally shattering her denial in a compelling and bloody climax. A quirky, character driven and darkly comic debut in the tone of "Notes on A Scandal", "A Kind of Intimacy" is an offbeat and ironic study of misunderstandings. It traces the dark possibilities of best intentions going awry and gives an unsettling glimpse into a clumsy young woman who has too much in common with the rest of us to be written off as a monster.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 282
Publisher: Arcadia Books
Published: 26 Mar 2009

ISBN 10: 1906413398
ISBN 13: 9781906413392

Media Reviews
'An intense and intriguing novel that never quite lets the reader get comfortable. It understands about the fuzzy boundary between the normal and the strange, and weaves them together in a gripping, ever-darkening narrative' Jenny Diski
Author Bio
Jenn Ashworth was born in 1982 in Preston. She studied English at Cambridge and Creative Writing at Manchester. She is now Head Librarian in a prison. Her first novel went missing with a stolen computer, but an extract from it won the Cambridge University Quiller-Couch Prize for Creative Writing in 2003. In 2006 an extract from A Kind of Intimacy, her second novel, won second prize in a national competition: The Enigma of Personality. She is also the recipient of the Manchester Literary Festival Best Writing on a Blog 2008.