Product Description

Carmel McKisco is wry, volatile and full of longing: a twenty-year-old girl working nights in a Manchester dive bar. Cut off from her family, and from Tony, her carefree ex, she forges strange alliances with her customers, and daydreams, half-heartedly, about escaping to Cornwall, her own Elysian Fields. Cold Water is a poignant picaresque of barmaids and barflies; eccentric individuals all somehow tethered to their past - not least Carmel herself, who is nurturing mordant fixations on both her lost love, Tony, and her washed-up adolescent hero: a singer from Macclesfield. As she spins out the days and nights of an unrelentingly rainy winter she finds herself compelled to confront her romantic preoccupations, for better or worse. Confident, fresh, and completely original, Cold Water has a voice to match - whether sharp or sentimental, tender or sassy, elegant or dryly sardonic. Peopled with memorable characters and imbued with a subtle sense of longing and raw loneliness beneath the banter and whimsy, this thrilling debut is as cool and assured as Carmel herself - a funny, memorable and strangely affecting look at the way people drift into and out of each other's lives, and how they find their place in the world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #86991 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

About the Author
Gwendoline Riley was born in 1979.

Customer Reviews

Manchester Noir
Cold Water is an intriguing debut that has rightly received praise for its language and style. It is a short novel, but concentrated, so images and events play back on you at a later date. It demands reading at one sitting not just because of its readability but because the subtlety of the writing loses some of its effect if interrupted. A series of scenes and vignettes of bar flies and barmaids, the reader is soon immersed in a Manchester that is given an overdue cinematic hue. Sure, Manchester is notorious for its rain, its industrial decline and its music scene, but anyone who lives, works and goes out here knows that it can sometimes be a very special place - and the lack of previous literary descriptions of the city therefore seems surprising. Maybe it takes a young writer - unencumbered by the dominant London media scene and enamoured of American writing - to draw out the glamour from the grime. The Guardian has praised the novel's poetic descriptions, as if Riley sees things in a different way, but I felt that her style is best with its economy of narrative. She chisels a scene or an anecdote to a point and then lets it hang in the air without the bane of so much literary English fiction, the over explanation. Whereas the woolly monsters of Rushdie, Amis and Zadie Smith make a virtue of this emphasising a point, its rare to find a writer, particularly a debutant, who knows when to stop. In this she reminds me a little of John Lanchester or even Magnus Mills, but with the added virtue of a more colourful prose. Its got that strange nostalgia of the young, similar to Catcher in the Rye, where the best things - say, first love - have already happened and the future is not so much unknown, as on hold. She is exceptionally good at contrasting Carmel's wistful melancholy against the more sodden version of the bar flies that pepper the book. There's an accurate pessimism about the number of dreams broken and dreamers who've given up; again, something we're more used to hear from an American perspective - or in songs like Joni Mitchell's Last Time I saw Richard. Its good to read a book where every character is real, has real jobs or is trying not to have a real job. The only star or success is a washed up one - the glamorous singer, now a drug wreckage, crashed and burned. If I've a quibble, its with the wide cast of minor characters that makes it hard to care too much about them. It is the reality of barlife - passing faces - but a more contrived group would perhaps deliver the reader more empathy, beyond the narrator.; and it is very short, not a problem in itself, but, like a lot of first novels, two thirds through you realise that it is probably not going to surprise you, except in the prose, which is a delight throughout.

Cold Water, Warm Read
Based in Manchester, Cold Water is the debut novel from Gwendoline Riley, featuring a snap shot of the life of Carmel McKisco. Carmel is a dreamer and much of the book revolves around her dreams and her dissatisfaction with her nowhere life. Infact, not a great deal happens in Cold water, but this is the book's strength. Riley's prose is so dreamy and poetic yet so sparse and blunt that you can't helped but be gripped. Carmel doesn't come across as a particularly likeable character - at times you feel like shaking her and saying "Get your act together", but nonetheless you find yourself wishing that she finds the happiness in life that seems to elude her.

Cold Water is a short novel at less than 150 pages long, but every word is purposefully written, nothing is superfluous or unnecessary. Some readers might perhaps find it a tad boring, but with this book you have to read between the lines, and I found that the inactivity and inertia of the main characters actually spoke volumes and affected me more than other novels in a similiar vein which purposely set out to shock (such as Helen Walsh's Brass, which failed to impress me).

For such a young novelist, I think Riley shows great talent and promise and I look forward to seeing how her work develops over time.

Disappointing ...
I bought this book on the strength of the blurb, particularly the comparison to Denis Johnson, and the promise of a 'truly original new voice in fiction'. I was well disappointed on both counts. The premise of a dislocated youth adrifting in a twilight world has been the subject of fiction for some considerable time now, and has almost always been done better than this. Whereas Johnson's luminous work is, to me, drenched in humanity, this book is a pretty pale imitation.