Only Human by Susie Boyt

Only Human by Susie Boyt

Marjorie Hemming, marriage guidance counsellor, craves concord and harmony the way other people need cigarettes. She longs for all her quarrelling couples to be reconciled, and is delighted when people start to mistake her for an angelic nurse in a hospital TV drama series. But her alarmingly skinny teenage daughter has secrets she won't reveal, and some couples just refuse to kiss and make up. Even stalwart Nurse Rose is acting out of character as she launches herself into an obviously doomed marriage. Marjorie has knitted her world together with care - is it starting to fray?

Only Human ends with some of the arguments and situations in motion, others unaddressed, a few resolvedWhat is surprising is the amount of stored laughter and banked-up optimism you retain from the wreckage of these fictional lives. Reading this book is like plugging your emotional battery-charger into the mains. Its crisply original, unshowy languge tingles with static; its insight jolts dangerously; its gags spark and sputter cleverly. Yet Only Human leaves you feeling warm and solid despite and because of your own - ultimately - limited capacities - Saturday Telegraph

A fresh and wholly idiosyncratic take on life - Independent

This is subtly done: there are reservoirs of grief here, but they are sounded not plumbed, their presence registering on the surface as evidence of emptiness below Despite this the novel does not depress and there is some startling sharp humour it is hard not to be won over - TLS

Her most self-assured book yet, by turns funny and sad - Telegraph Magazine

A sharp and funny portrait of people trying to find connections as their lives unravel around them - Observer

The fourth novel by Susie Boyt is both funny and painful. Delighting in quiet detail - the rich colour of a coat, the sight of slender birds across a patch of sky - she lends grace and elegance to this tale of an ordinary woman trying to be good in a difficult

Susie Boyt, daughter of the painter, Lucian Freud, was born in London in 1969. She is the author of The Normal Man, which was read on Radio 4's Woman's Hour, The Characters of Love and (in Headline) The Last Hope of Girls. She lives in Regents Park.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780747270980
ISBN 10	0747270988
Title	Only Human
Author	Susie Boyt
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Headline Publishing Group
Year published	2004-07-05
Number of pages	256
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.