When To Walk
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
It looks like just another week ahead. Then out of the blue Ramble’s husband ends their marriage over lunch and disappears. With no rent money and her world in shreds, she is forced to reconsider everything she’s ever been taught by her screwy relatives, unreliable friends and wayward criminal connections. Should she hide in life’s slipstream, or has the moment come to break free? When to Walk is an astonishing debut, lit up with hope and unexpected laughter.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British writer Gowers follows her nonfiction work on Victorian criminals, The Swamp of Death, with a fictive weeklong journey inside the head of Ramble, a London woman quietly going crazy. Handicapped, partially deaf Ramble provides first-person narration that careens from her thoughts on photocopying pound notes to her grandmother's childhood to 1840s Stamp Office clerks with barely a breath. When husband Con calls her an "autistic vampire" and takes off with the petty criminal living downstairs, Ramble comes unglued, and the narrative goes along with her: "Remedial wise, give HER! The short shrift treatment NOW! And in a few days hence you will be beholding to no one: a law unto yourself. Oh yes!" While several quirky characters particularly Stella, Ramble's dementia-suffering grandmother, and Johnson Pike, her childhood friend are well imagined, Ramble's voice isn't enough to hold the book together as she flies apart.
