When I Ran Away
An unforgettable debut about love pushed to its outer limits
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- CHF 2.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
'Smart, brave and often very funny . . . profoundly moving' Sarah Haywood, author of The Cactus
This morning Gigi left her husband and children.
Now she's watching Real Housewives and drinking wine in a crummy hotel room, trying to work out how she got here.
When the Twin Towers collapsed, Gigi Stanislawski fled her office building and escaped lower Manhattan on the Staten Island Ferry. Among the crying, ash-covered and shoeless passengers, Gigi, unbelievably, found someone she recognised - the guy with pink socks and a British accent - from the coffee shop across from her office. Together she and Harry Harrison make their way to her parents' house where they watch the television replay the planes crashing for hours, and she waits for the phone call from her younger brother that never comes. And after Harry has shared the worst day of her life, it's time for him to leave.
Ten years later, Gigi, now a single mother consumed with bills and unfulfilled ambitions, bumps into Harry again and this time they fall deeply in love. When they move to London it feels like a chance for the happy ending she never dared to imagine. But it also highlights the differences in their class and cultures, which was something they laughed about until it wasn't funny anymore; until the traumatic birth of their baby leaves Gigi raw and desperately missing her best friends and her old life in New York.
As Gigi grieves for her brother and rages at the unspoken pain of motherhood, she realises she must somehow find a way back - not to the woman she was but to the woman she wants to be.
An unforgettable novel about love - for our partners, our children, our mothers, and ourselves - pushed to its outer limits.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bannister's emotionally raw debut offers an unflinching glimpse of new motherhood. When readers first encounter native New Yorker Gigi Harrison in London, she's leaving her English husband, Harry, and their two young children for a seedy hotel. In between answering texts from an increasingly panicked Harry, Gigi gradually recounts what made her leave Harry, starting with their first encounter 15 years before on the Staten Island Ferry, as both were fleeing Manhattan on 9/11. Harry's kindness after Gigi and her working-class family learn her 19-year-old brother, Frankie, died in the attack endears him to her, but the two eventually lose touch. In 2012, when their paths cross again, Gigi has become an adoptive mom to Johnny, the infant son of Frankie's former girlfriend. Gigi and Harry fall in love, and Gigi reluctantly follows Harry back to London and into an increasingly lonely realm of homesickness and functional alcoholism, especially after the traumatic birth of their son. Some of Gigi's musings read like a retread of the "mummy wars" debates, as she reflects on a friend who lost her career after having a child, but Bannister effectively captures Gigi's awareness of cultural and class divides. This poignant story feels genuine.
