Kelly + Victor - Softcover

Griffiths, Niall

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0224061666 ISBN 13: 9780224061667

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2002

Synopsis

A bar in Liverpool, January 2nd 2000: Victor, coming down from the recent global party, meets a girl. Some time later that night he is in her bed. This, he thinks, is the best sex he's ever had. Kelly, coming down after the recent global party, meets a boy. Some time later that night he is in her bed. This, she thinks, is the best sex she's ever had.

So the story of Kelly + Victor progresses, through two mirror-image narratives: a story of the growth and spiralling intensity of a sexual obsession, traced to its inevitable, devastating conclusion. Set against a backdrop of urban despair, spiritual absence and a world swamped with pornography, this is a novel about yearning for union, for purity, and for magic and mystery in a world that denies them all. And it is, above everything, a love story - or all that twenty-first-century Britain will allow of one.

Having established himself immediately with the under-class vernacular of Grits and the thrilling apocalyptic visions of Sheepshagger, Niall Griffiths moves, with this, his third book, into new, equally uncompromising territories - to the darker limits of human experience, the furthest edges of physical love.

About this title

Review:

It's the dawn of the new millennium and most people in Liverpool are coping with a thousand-year hangover. But in the midst of the debris, two people have found something wonderful: Kelly and Victor have found each other--and after just a few hours, they can't believe they were ever apart. In this harsh city, where hard men rule and ordinary people only work in order to pay for their next weekend of oblivion, a pair of young lovers has suddenly found a new reason to live. But love proves to be a more a dangerous drug than anything they could score on the streets. Written from the dual perspective of its two doomed protagonists, Kelly and Victor might be described as a modern love story. But despite moments of great tenderness, this is no book for romantics. Niall Griffiths' distinctive brand of Mersey-dark realism--well established in the underground classics Grits and Sheepshagger--is entering uncharted territory here, laying bare the least-visited quarters of human desire. This is a powerful, often frightening tale, in which people capable of the purest acts of love are also capable of violence and fatal obsessions. We might now be well into the third millennium, but Kitty and Victor's compelling message is that the Dark Ages are far from over. --Matthew Baylis

Review:

"The range of Griffiths's achievement is as exhilarating as the reach of his ambition" (Guardian)

"Moving between the sacred and the profane, Kelly + Victor is a book breathing at the limits of experience, its protagonists martyrs to feeling in a world gone numb" (Independent)

"Griffiths has written a love story which has all the signs of becoming a modern classic" (The Times)

"With Kelly + Victor Griffiths has completed his transition into a literary voice for the twenty-first century" (Scotsman)

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0224061666
• ISBN 13: 9780224061667
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352