Product Description

Returning to Manchester, her broken home, Esther moves back to the flat she used to share with her best friend Donna. Surrounded by empty gin bottles, with her past life safely taped up in stacked cardboard boxes, she proceeds to turn her back on a 'real world' that seems meaningless and absurd. Instead she lives in her own head. Then she meets Newton, a care-worn American wanderer with a drinker's face and an angel's smile. Newton changes everything. But for how long?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #452043 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 220 pages

About the Author
Gwendoline Riley was born in Liverpool in 1979. After graduating early from Manchester University she studied on Michael Schmidt's writing course and at the age of 20 was appointed literary editor of City Life magazine. Her first novel, Cold Water, won a Betty Trask Award and she was chosen by the Guardian as one of six best first novelists in 2002.

Customer Reviews

Beautiful, true and tragic
There are few books which really touch me in the way that this one does. It is gorgeous and painful, wonderful and tragic all in the same breath. Most importantly and skillfully of all, it captures that once-in-a-lifetime moment that we all experience - the moment where we should stop, act, grab hold of the things that are precious to us and hold onto them with religious fervour, but somehow we don't. We keep walking on, abandoning the beauty in front of our face, in the vain hope that there is something better round the corner.

At the heart of this novel lies one question. What if this moment, the one that is happening here, now, is the only chance I'll get? What if this is the only time I might ever find the one person who can make me happy? Should I gamble everything on this moment? What if I'm wrong? Worse still, if this is the moment - if this is "the one", what happens if I do nothing? Will I have lost the only chance I EVER had to be happy?

This book makes me feel 19 years old again, makes me cry and yearn and wish for salvation all at once. I haven't read anything as touching or as true in a long long time.

sick?maybe
i think this was a lovely detailed description of people and place but mostly the main character whose realy disfunctional.she doesn't do a good job of coping with life but while she's floating about writing notes on her arm with her biro you realy warm to her and want to wrap her up and look after her.
i haven't read cold water yet so i don't know if i'd feel different if i'd read that first.
you realy get a feeling your reading about the author in this book.but personaly i like the sound of her,it made me want to meet her.so i did.well kindof.i went to an event she did in london with two other authors(helen walsh and clare sudbury(sp?))and she mumbled into her book and she was just like you'd think the character would be.i didn't talk to her though coz she didn't look like she wanted people to talk to her.
if you liked this book you'll probably like the books by the other two authors:brass by helen walsh and the dying of delight by clare sudbury(sp?)

"I don't want a lover, I just want to be sick"
I loved 'Cold Water' - ok, most people did. And so I should be glad that 'Sick Notes' is pretty much 'Cold Water 2' or 'Return to the Cold Water'. I am, oh, I am... but...

There's a lingering sensation whilst reading this novel(la) that I'm reading Riley's diary. It doesn't seem all that fictional. Esther used to work in a bar, and now she's had her first novel published... I think you know what I'm talking about. Whilst people smile wryly at any novelist's first work being autobiographical, one starts to panic when the second one is as well.

But I love the way Riley spins her images out at us like someone throwing quoits. She is amazing at crystalising a moment, or a fleeting picture, in an economy of words.

Unlike 'Cold Water', there seems to be more of a plot in 'Sick Notes'... which is always good (yet the timbre of Riley's writing is so magical that I got to the end of 'Cold Water' before realising that... errr... there wasn't much in the way of a plot). It was intriguing, too, to be taken into Esther's childhood, which helps to explain, perhaps, why she finds it so difficult to love. She cannot believe in Newton's love, which is such a fleeting joy... she just wants to be sick.

She wanders the city, a Mancunian flaneuse, the concrete and the clatter of the of the pavement, and the puddles round her feet all feed into the texture of the prose.

(Intriguing, however, is the news that in June we will have 'Tuesday Nights & Wednesday Mornings: A Novella & Stories' by Riley, which is apparently a novella called 'TN&WM' and some short stories. But how very odd - the description of the novella is identical to 'Sick Notes'! Is this the American version, and our cousins over the pond get some short stories flung in as well? Lucky them! Oh, help me someone, I need advice!)