Cold Water

Riley has been featured in the national media as a star on the make, and her first novel, a slim but memorable testament to urban life in the 21st century, provides all the reasons why. She completed the novel in her early 20s while working bar shifts in central Manchester and her narrator Carmel McKisco similarly works in a bar and is in her early 20s. It gets harder to draw resemblances past that, although it must be said that on first appearances Riley like Carmel seems to be a girl whose carapace of cool is seamlessly sewn. As readers, of course, we're let into Carmel's private world, where we see she's not as sorted as she appears. Early in the book she tells us her dad died when she was 14. 'I found him, sitting stiffly on the settee when I came in late, one night, his eyes open behind his glasses, Guardian on his knee and an ashtray balanced on the arm of his chair. I clicked off the hissing TV and sat down next to him. I wasn't upset. I felt relieved. For us and for him.' This economy of style, with its astute juxtapositions of emotion, sensation and factual detail, runs as the backbone to the narrative. Not much happens, in fact. Carmel daydreams a lot about Tony, her ex-boyfriend, but when she does eventually get back together with him, she knows it won't work. She takes trips; she tells us about her wardrobe. She tells in wistful word-pictures of urban drifting, with brief flames of friendship turning into ashy semi-connection with half-strangers. When her friend Katja admits to having 'run out of energy... every morning when I go down to collect my mail, I say to myself please please today let there be something in the post that's going to change my life', Carmel is brought up short by this also-truth about her life. 'I stopped hanging out with her so much after that.' Riley mercilessly delineates the gaps between Carmel's outer shell and inner thoughts, her fantasy and her lived experience, and presents us with a narrative both compelling and wise. (Kirkus UK)