Snowflake
Winner of Newcomer of the Year
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- 3,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
WINNER OF SUNDAY INDEPENDENT NEWCOMER OF THE YEAR 2021, AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARDS
'Wonderful and mad' Roddy Doyle
'Sparks with tender charm and humour . . . Fresh, bleakly funny' Sunday Times
'Tender, laugh-out-loud funny and deeply moving' Louise O'Neill
'GAS and beautiful and truthful and touching' Marian Keyes, author of Grown Ups
'A novel for anyone who's ever felt lost in the world' John Boyne, author of The Heart's Invisible Furies
'Sharp, clever and affecting' The Independent
'Beautifully written . . . emotionally intelligent and thought-provoking' Daily Mail
'Astonishing' Stacey Halls, author of The Familiars
Debbie's brain isn't perfect. Debbie's thoughts aren't unique. Debbie's dreams are all too real.
Debbie White lives on a dairy farm with her mother, Maeve, and her uncle, Billy. Billy sleeps out in a caravan in the garden with a bottle of whiskey and the stars overhead for company. Maeve spends her days recording her dreams, which she believes to be prophecies.
This world is Debbie's normal, but she is about to step into life as a student at Trinity College Dublin. As she navigates between sophisticated new friends and the family bubble, things begin to unravel. Maeve's eccentricity tilts into something darker, while Billy's drinking gets worse. Debbie struggles to cope with the weirdest, most difficult parts of herself and her small life. But if the Whites are mad, they are also fiercely loving, and each other's true place of safety.
Startling, fresh and utterly unique, Snowflake is a story of messy families, messier friendships and how new chapters often mean starting right back at the beginning.
A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK AT BEDTIME PICK
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this fresh and often humorous debut, Nealon follows a wry young Irish woman as she negotiates family burdens. After insecure narrator Deborah leaves her family's dairy farm in rural Kildare County for Trinity College, she doesn't exactly blossom—"The only thing I'm learning in college is how to hide"—but she does befriend Xanthe, a rich, glamorous student with whom she shares a fascination with and jealousy of the other's lifestyle (Xanthe finds it "amazing" that Deborah comes from the "proper countryside"; Deborah thinks five euros for a cup of tea is "daylight robbery"). While Deborah struggles to adjust to college life, her family begins to crack under long-simmering tensions. Her single mother, Maeve, who claims not to know the identity of Deborah's father, is dating a farmworker not much older than her daughter and has a penchant for "inhaling fresh whiffs of reality and exhaling her own mystery." Billy, her gruff yet caring uncle, lives in a caravan on the farm and strives to protect Deborah from her mother's mood swings. The Dublin scenes don't particularly stand out from myriad other campus novels, but the narrative acquires a burnishing glow once outside the confines of academe. When on the farm, this tale of two worlds vibrates on an otherworldly frequency.
