Pages for You - Hardcover

Brownrigg, Sylvia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330484613 ISBN 13: 9780330484619

Publisher: Picador, 2001

Synopsis

An unusual, lyrical love story - beautifully written and thoroughly compelling.Haunted by an unspoken passion, a narrator decides to write some pages, pages comprising the story of the beginning, the blossoming, and finally the ending of a young woman's most intense love affair. 'Each day a page, to show you that I am finding a story, the story of how we might have been together, once. Of how we could be'.An unformed, innocent student in her first semester at university, Flannery Jansen initially encounters her lover in a local diner. But her tentative overtures - a look, a blush - are dismissed and Flannery retreats, humiliated. Future chance meetings on campus discourage Flannery even more, for Anne Arden is sophisticated and poised; in Flannery's eyes almost impossibly beautiful. Until she realizes that Anne feels the same way about her.

About this title

Review:

Sylvia Brownrigg's Pages for You is the story of a sentimental, sensual education, a love affair between a student and a teacher--all blushes, kisses, books and poetry. Flannery is just 17 and a first-year student at an American university; Anne, a lecturer, is 28: "wise, well-travelled, sophisticated". Flannery sees this red-haired, red-lipped goddess drinking coffee in a diner, wearing "pointed, pretty, argumentative boots", and is immediately smitten. Her dreams begin to taunt her with a "bawdy vividness", and much to her surprise the dreams become a reality, when Anne returns her affections. The story is beautifully paced, in small, concise chapters, each capturing a moment in an intense emotional experience. The prose is lyrical and a little gauche, mirroring Flannery's youth and her enthusiasm for literature--she is a poet in the making, and her heartfelt narration of her own story reflects that. If Desdemona loved Othello partly for his stories, than Flannery loves Anne partly for the content of her bookshelves. The novel is lush with sensation and impression; a recognition of the physical passion that the two women share:

If doubt had smouldered in Anne at first, the sex extinguished it ... Her questions were silenced by their pleasure calls, and the smoothness and the fluidity of their limbs together calmed her.

The novel is intimate and romantic, vivid as the "passionate hot fall of the autumn leaves with their brilliant reds, yellows and golds". --Eithne Farry

Review:

'Like Turgenev or Katherine Mansfield, Sylvia Brownrigg understands that the inexperienced lover is a detective who doesn't know which clues matter... mesmerising' Helen Dunmore, The Times 'Exuberant and wistful' Times Literary Supplement 'A candid, fresh and vivid novel' The Sunday Telegraph

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0330484613
• ISBN 13: 9780330484619
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240