Neon in Daylight
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- 3,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
'What do you get when a writer of extreme intelligence, insight, style and beauty chronicles the lives of self-absorbed hedonists - The Great Gatsby, Bright Lights, Big City, and now Neon in Daylight. Hermione Hoby held me spellbound' Ann Patchett, author of COMMONWEALTH
'Hoby is so good at unpacking all the strange dynamics at work in sex and desire' Emma Cline, author of THE GIRLS
'The perfect book with which to while away those hot summer nights' Independent
'Expect Gatsby-esque hedonism and lyricism' Evening Standard
'You will be transfixed' The Pool
'Smart, shimmering ... glinting with pocketable images and insights ... A vibrant rush of a novel' Observer
A New York summer so hot the air is turning yellow.
Kate, a young woman newly arrived from London, is determined to become the kind of person who is up for it and down for it - and not remotely troubled over how those two semantically opposed phrases could have come to mean the same thing.
In the sweltering city, she encounters Bill, a once-lauded now booze-sodden novelist, and Inez, his teenage daughter who makes extra cash catering to the sexual fantasies of men she has met online - and falls into a complex infatuation with them both.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An Englishwoman named Kate arrives in contemporary New York with no plan and no prospects in Hoby's promising debut novel. Kate has abandoned her PhD program and boyfriend, so disillusioned that "speaking anything out loud" has come to "feel like an audacity." She finds two accomplices to the reinvention she seeks: Inez, a teenager Kate befriends after Inez confuses her for someone looking to buy Adderall, and Inez's washed-up novelist father, Bill. Kate remains ignorant of their familial link even as the drugs Inez introduces her to fuel Kate and Bill's "mutual seduction." Though Hoby relies on a well-trod conceit in mirroring Kate's quest for self-actualization with her exploration of New York, her sharp distillations of the demands the city makes of people energize the book's familiar beats. Most memorable is Inez's side hustle of fulfilling the fantasies of "Craigslist perverts," surprising encounters that compensate for the more predictable moments. Indeed, even as a collision between Kate's friendship and love affair becomes inevitable, Hoby wisely avoids posing the necessary confrontations as a resolution to Kate's problems. This is a sharp novel with perceptive observations (at a gallery, "there's something religious-looking about iPhones raised en masse") and vivid, complicated relationships.
