Common Ground
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Ashley, a disaffected geography teacher and Jay, a printer in a local arts project, are about to start a family, though both have mixed feelings about becoming parents, especially when their house is crumbling around them and their neighbourhood seems increasingly anarchic. As Jay becomes deeply involved in the fight to save the ancient woodland of Hogslea Common from a planned motorway, Ashley corresponds with his carefree brother, who is backpacking round the world. With the gap between the couple widening as steadily as the cracks in their walls, Ashley has to choose between his parents' values and abandoning a society he finds increasingly precarious and menacing.
By the author of the award-winning PIG, this is a sharply observed, often funny and thought-provoking tale of modern life and of the choices we all have to make - as parents, children and members of society.
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Life's been looking pretty dreary to Ashley Brook, the unlikely hero of this wry, searching second novel from Scotland native Cowan (whose first novel, Pig, won the Sunday Times Young Writers Award). Ashley hates his job, teaching biology to bored, contemptuous high-schoolers: "Why do you do bother doing this job, Mr Brook? Seriously? What is the point?" asks one, in the middle of class. His pregnant girlfriend, Jay, treats him with unwavering ambivalence (the mere suggestion of marriage nauseates her), and his dour mother wants to leave his father and move in. To top it off, the government plans to pave over the local forest, and the scrappy, strongheaded Jay seems to care more about their town's doomed, somewhat kooky fight to save the trees than she cares about putting down roots of her own. Only one pleasure comes easy to Ashley: writing to his laid-off younger brother, Doug, who's squandering his "redundancy" (severance) pay on an adventurous, solo backpacking trip around the world. In their correspondence, Ashley reveals a saving sense of humor--and a capacity for love and warmth that sets him apart from the joyless, angry or menacing people who surround him. Like his protagonists, Cowan charms with earthy, class-conscious wit and matter-of-fact British decency. Although he relies too heavily on violence (both police and criminal) to tug at the reader's bleeding heartstrings, Cowan's efforts to mix domestic and environmental drama recall the best recent work of young Americans like Jonathan Franzen and Rick Moody. Cowan clearly wants to write about what matters, and--if only as the chronicler of one new, struggling, hopeful family--he succeeds.
