You
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- £12.99
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- £12.99
Publisher Description
'A meditation on the lengths we will go to for love ... Briscoe is brilliant at conveying the obsessiveness of teenage love, ratcheting up the tension until the reader is every bit as involved as the character ... beguilingly good' Observer
Cecilia is obsessively in love with her teacher, the older, married Mr. Dahl. She plots and speculates, yet she never guesses that what she dreams of could actually happen. Is it her imagination, or is the high-minded Mr. Dahl responding to her?
Cecilia's mother Dora wants the good life. She and her husband moved to Dartmoor so their children could run wild, free to make their own choices and mistakes. But Dora discovers that there is more to the countryside idyll, and indeed to her own marriage, than she assumed, when she finds herself fascinated by the very last, the very worst person she could fall for: the elegant and dangerous Elisabeth Dahl.
Now, after twenty years, Cecilia is coming home, to face Dora, and to face her past. But the excitement and pain she had thought were buried cannot be buried. The past is a dangerous place.
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You, the unnerving and exceptional novel from Joanna Briscoe, is a stunning story of sex, memory and family lies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A children's book author excavates her past in Briscoe's taut follow-up to Sleep with Me. Cecilia Bannon returns to her childhood home on the English moor with her husband and children to care for her mother, Dora. The novel moves back and forth from the current story to the 1970s, when Dora moved to the country, hoping for a life of bohemian freedom and artistic expression for her children, an ideal that takes shape at Hayes House, the local progressive school. But Cecilia's English teacher, James Dahl, has a different lesson in store for the girl, and his indulgence in her school girl crush leads to a very real pregnancy that ends with an informal adoption. Back in the present, Cecilia, now a mother to three girls, is so haunted by having given up her first daughter that she embarks on a mission to find her, though what she discovers isn't at all what she expected. Briscoe depicts this world of few rules and many consequences with honesty and with compassion. In lucid, observant prose, she captures the messiness of family and, crushingly, the consequences of desire.