My Phantoms

Review What a phenomenal ear she has, and how remorselessly funny she is - My Phantoms is unmissably good -- Kevin Barry, author of ― Night Boat to Tangier 'My Phantoms is the funniest and bleakest book I have read in a long time. It's also the most moving - unexpectedly, perhaps, as it sets about capturing the awful comedy of a particularly English kind of sourness: one that takes perverse delight in disappointment and calamity. 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 MOTHERS Devastated by this novel. Gwendoline Riley can draw character like nobody else. The weight each pristine, witty sentence carries! This is life, its aches, its silences, its love, what is carried and left unsaid. Her prose is so sharp you could cut yourself on it -- Elizabeth Macneal 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 Brick Lane A writer of singular vision ― Guardian Take up the gauntlet with Gwendoline Riley: it's worth it -- Alex Clark ― TLS [Riley] fixes her parents on the page with darkly comic precision, mercilessly attendant to their tics and repetitions... Deliciously uncomfortable -- Justine Jordan ― Guardian Riley's novels get under your skin. My Phantoms is unsettling for many reasons - the way it picks at the scab of unconditional love, the way it interrogates questions of inheritance and influence. More than anything, though, it's the fact that it chips away at the compact between reader and narrator... devastating, bleak, unforgettable -- Alex Preston ― Observer Insidiously powerful... There's a lot of sentimental, affirmative fiction about femininity out there at the moment. This jagged little novel stands as a bracing corrective -- Claire Allfree ― Evening Standard Riley is a laureate of the stilted, and the dialogue crackles with repetitions, unsaid ellipses, contradictions... There is a great deal of psychological perceptiveness in this slim novel... [My Phantoms sets] itself apart, and is vital, and dashing -- Stuart Kelly ― Scotsman By some way Riley's best book, a crisply devastating record of a mother-daughter dynamic ― New Statesman A masterpiece in compression... My Phantoms leaves us with a precise and bleak-humoured portrait of the phantoms that can haunt a family -- N. J. Stallard ― Literary Review One for anyone who has struggled with their relationship with their mother. Riley dials up the tension as she skewers familial love ― i Paper Gwendoline Riley's unsentimental fiction hovers on the edge of comedy and bleakness... My Phantoms is a distilled psychological tour de force from an exceptional writer -- Madeleine Feeny ― Spectator Riley misses nothing, and her icy evocations of dysfunction and distress are unforgettable -- Dinah Birch ― TLS Riley has the ability to draw out the subtle workings and cruelties of relationships and psyches, and wrest them into compact, hard-hitting stories -- Baya Simons ― FT Deeply sad and uncomfortable but savagely funny, too... Riley's prose echoes the repressed trauma that suffuses the novel - spare and elegant -- Gwendolyn Smith ― i Paper My Phantoms is completely devastating -- Joanna Kavenna ― Oldie A riveting, merciless little novel ― Sunday Times One of those books in which nothing much happens and everything happens... a brilliant brief, acerbic, witty, dark read that I can't recommend heartily enough -- Rose Ruane ― BBC Scotland Unsettlingly funny and sharply observant... With notes of Sally Rooney's style in its tightly-written dialogue -- Emily Chudy ― Independent My Phantoms effectively captures the ennui of our times