Tender
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"Tender charts the marshy territory of friendship, obsession and love, and offers no easy path. . . richly nuanced and utterly absorbing" Guardian
"Are you asleep?" James said, nudging her with his leg.
"No," Catherine said, the word all in a drowse.
"Don't go to sleep," he said, and she heard him turn a page.
Catherine and James are as close as two friends could ever be. They meet in Dublin in the late 1990s, she a college student, he a fledgling artist - both recent arrivals from rural communities, coming of age in a city which is teeming - or so they are told - with new freedoms, new possibilities.
Catherine has never met anyone quite like James. Talented, quick-witted, adventurous and charismatic, he helps Catherine to open her eyes, to take on life with more gusto than she has ever before known how to do; she begins to enjoy her new home, to find her voice as a writer and to meet with the people who will shape her new world.
But while Catherine's horizons are expanding, James's own life is becoming a prison; as changed as the new Ireland may be, it is still not a place in which he feels able to truly be himself. Catherine, grateful to James and worried for him, desperately wants to help - but as time moves on, and as life begins to take the friends in different directions, she discovers that there is a perilously fine line between helping someone and hurting them further. And when crisis hits, Catherine must face difficult truths not just about her closest bond - but about herself.
From the author of the multi-award-winning debut Solace comes another dazzling exploration of the complexities of human relationships, a novel about friendship and youth, about selfhood and sexuality, about the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we are taught to tell. Brave, moving and powerfully told, Tender confirms Belinda McKeon's status as one of the most exciting contemporary voices in Irish fiction.
PRAISE FOR BELINDA MCKEON
"McKeon. . .captures what it is like to be young in Dublin with grace, subtlety and sympathy. She makes her characters both alluring and complex, and indeed dangerous, too" Colm Toibin
"McKeon is a superb and sophisticated writer, who captures the barely articulable feelings between young people on the brink of adulthood" The Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At first glance, McKeon's second work of fiction (after Irish Book of the Year winner Solace) explores well-trod themes. Two college-aged youngsters in Dublin meet through mutual acquaintances, develop a friendship, and experience much elation and angst over the course of a year together in the late 1990s. But as the raw and claustrophobic story progresses, it becomes devastatingly clear that the path their relationship is taking is far from ordinary. For one, budding photographer James is gay and closeted, during a time when homosexuality isn't widely accepted in Ireland. His anguish and frustration at not being able to love freely is deftly handled by McKeon, who mostly relies on what isn't said to lend weight to his predicament. Instead, what propels the plot forward is the sheer force of Catherine's blind love for James. She wants all of him, first emotionally, and then physically a wrinkle that adds depth to the friends' tragic coupling and makes their breaking apart so easy to predict and so heartbreaking to read. Catherine's self-destructive obsession with James may verge on maddening for readers (though the author's choice to saddle her with an interest in Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, written about Sylvia Plath and published in 1998, was a smart one). But the book's final chapters, detailing the older and wiser friends' bittersweet reunion in New York 14 years later, proves that time does heal the heart's deepest wounds or, as McKeon so aptly demonstrates, at least most of them.
