A Kind of Intimacy - Softcover

Ashworth, Jenn

3.77

1,202 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1933372869 ISBN 13: 9781933372860

Publisher: Europa Editions, 2010

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In Annie Fairhurst's world, the persistent exhortation to better oneself regularly moves her to embark on thoroughly terrifying journeys.

After an attempt at marriage and motherhood, Annie is obese, socially awkward, yet determined to escape a difficult past and to start over. She moves into a new neighborhood, bringing virtually nothing from her previous life with her. Then again, there is very little of her previous life left to bring. She has wiped the slate clean.

Neil, Annie's unsuspecting new neighbor, makes the mistake of being friendly and, convinced his friendliness indicates that he is enamored of her, Annie's bizzare behavior escalates from petulant to, finally, criminal. All the while, Annie is convinced that she is the one to whom life has dealt a foul hand, that she is the real victim. As the persona she has so meticulously created begins to crumble, a bloody and disastrous finale seems inevitable.

Told by a narrator as easy to fall for as she is difficult to believe, A Kind of Intimacy is a sardonic look at self-help gone disastrously wrong.

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About the Author:

Jenn Ashworth studied English at Cambridge University and Creative Writing at Manchester. In 2006 an exract from A Kind of Intimacy was short-listed in a national competition entitled "The Enigma of Personality."

In 2009 she left her job as a prison librarian in order to work on her second novel. You can read her award-winning blog at www.jennashworth.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. In her debut novel, Ashworth takes on a formidable task: an insane yet sympathetic protagonist whose efforts at self-help spell disaster. Annie Fairhurst is a socially inept and obese Briton who has murdered her husband and child—which is alluded to but not confirmed until later in the story. She moves into a duplex occupied by an unmarried couple, Neil and Lucy, and Annie immediately becomes obsessed with Neil, who unfortunately makes the mistake of being friendly. In Annie's warped mind, Neil is sending her secret signals of love, although no rational human being would agree from the evidence presented. Annie clashes with Lucy from the start and as their relationship devolves, Annie's strange and aggressive behavior—putting trash through Neil and Lucy's mail slot, stealing Lucy's dress, listening to Lucy and Neil's conversations through the shared wall of their duplex—escalates from childish to, finally, criminal, in a shocking series of actions. Interspersed throughout are glimpses of Annie's past, her troubled marriage and stilted feelings toward her infant daughter, Grace. The beautiful, provocative prose and dangerous, quirky protagonist mark Ashworth as a writer to watch. (June)
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