Tenterhooks - Hardcover

Dunn, Suzannah

3.61

18 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002256533 ISBN 13: 9780002256537

Publisher: Flamingo, 1998

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The best book yet from Britain’s answer to Lorrie Moore.

Could your soul sing for a ghost? Does your relationship need defrosting after a spell in the freezer? Do you go on holiday with your heart heavier than your luggage? The answers to these questions and others like them come only if you take your world, tip it on its side and look at it from underneath.

Here are exiles from the good times, women caught in a backwash that carries them drifting out beyond comfort, beyond safety, beyond reach. Bond-girl blonde Auntie Fay comes to Spain for the summers, survives on insulin injections and insolent Irish jokes, tans to the hue of a blood blister and routinely saves the skins of Renee and her unfortunate family. The sixth form do Pembrokeshire, on a field trip that has them relishing stale cigarettes, smuggled scotch, Suffragette City and, ultimately, mutiny. A young woman contemplates the consolations of a loveless relationship, while another rejoices in the small miracles around her as death blooms. Here are women wandering in their own private hinterland, given new life and direction by a wonderful writer who knows that, sometimes, ‘there is no other way to a heart than to saw through a breastbone’.

Britain’s answer to Lorrie Moore and Amy Bloom.

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Review:

‘Compelling power... Dunn shows again her gift for making the ordinary seem extraordinary. Her ear for the rhythms of speech is unerring, her feeling for the minutiae of experience acute. It takes a good deal of artistry to create the illusion of real life, and she has managed something more difficult still, which is to show us how strange real life can be.’
Christina Koning, The Times

‘Her prose is precise, images bloom like bruises or blood drops... compact worlds are contained in the simplest of descriptions. Dunn is a surgeon of the heart, and her observations are sparky.’
Eithne Farry, Time Out

From the Back Cover:

Could your soul sing for a ghost? Does your relationship need defrosting after a spell in the freezer? Do you go on holiday with your heart heavier than your luggage?

The answers to these questions and others like them come only if you take your world, tip it on its side and look at it from a fresh perspective. In these tightly engineered stories of people tumbling and righting themselves, of women falling in and then out of sync with the rhythms of their own lives, Suzannah Dunn takes her failsafe emotional spirit-level and shows us the balance of things – of hearts and minds.

Here are exiles from the good times, women caught in a backwash that carries them drifting out beyond comfort, beyond safety, beyond reach. Bond-girl blonde Auntie Fay comes to Spain for the summers, survives on insulin injections and insolent Irish jokes, tans to the hue of a blood blister and routinely saves the skins of Rence and her unfortunate family. The sixth-form do Pembrokeshire, on a field trip that has them relishing stale cigarettes, smuggled Scotch, Suffragette City and, ultimately, mutiny. A young woman contemplates the consolations of a loveless relationship, while another rejoices in the small miracles around her as death blooms... Here are women wandering in their own private hinterland, given new life and direction by a writer who knows that sometimes, ‘there is no other way to a heart than to saw through a breastbone’.

“Dunn is a surgeon of the heart, and her observations are sparky”
'Time Out'

“Dunn has a gift for making the ordinary seem extraordinary. Her ear for the rhythms of speech is unerring, her feeling for the minutiae of experience acute. It takes a good deal of artistry to create the illusion of real life, and she has managed something more difficult still, which is to show us how strange real life can be”
'The Times'

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