LATEST SALES & OFFERS: PROMOTIONS
Janice Galloway's first novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, now widely regarded as a Scottish contemporary classic, was published in 1990 and won the MIND/Allan Lane Book of the Year. Her second novel, Foreign Parts, won the American Academy of Arts and Letters EM Forster Award while her third, Clara, about the tempestuous life of nineteenth-century pianist Clara Wieck Schumann, won the Saltire Award in 2002. Collaborative texts include an opera with Sally Beamish and three cross-discipline works with Anne Bevan, the Orcadian sculptor. Her 'anti-memoir', This is not about me, was published by Granta in September 2008 to universal critical acclaim. She lives in Lanarkshire
From the much-praised Scottish author Galloway (The Trick Is to Keep Breathing, 1994, etc.), an intermittently amusing warts-and-all story of two unmarried Scotswomen on a dreary French holiday, told in brittle flakes of self-consciously modern writing. Rona and Cassie are both in their 30s. Rona can drive the rattling automobile, Cassie can't; Rona smilingly finds a solution to various problems, Cassie sulkily thinks negative-but-true thoughts: ...they would drink the coffee in silence, warding off the impending tip question...Foreign countries jesus. An interminable two weeks of this to come. As the two zig and zag through a bleakly downcast vision of roadside attractions and detours, Cassie relives her past with old boyfriends in accounts - starting back when Cassie was a lower-class tourist awed by the London Tube and ending on nudist beaches in Albania - that are delightfully awful: Tom. Happy as a pig in shit. Rows of compact arses turning their cheeks up to the sun in the guinness-coloured ovals of his shades. The novel finds a vein of life in these scenes more dense and powerful than in most of Rona's and Cassie's present-time misadventures, even adding in Galloway's didactic lectures about men, life, and the futility of escape through love or tourism: or after sitting through an homage to Molly Bloom's Ulysses monologue - in which Cassie expresses both her longing for men and her disgust of them - by which time one will be drumming one's fingertips in impatience. Well-observed scenes of quotidian France and hilariously downbeat details of modern love can't overcome the book's end-reliance on a sentimental, simplistic teaser - will Cassie and Rona become a romantic couple? - and leaving the question of love for the next holiday trip only further postpones the drama in this one. A Thelma and Louise without the guns, the adventure, or even the convertible. (Kirkus Reviews)
