Tell Me Everything
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Discover a novelist that Neil Gaiman describes as ‘an astonishingly smart writer’.
When a chance meeting with a stranger leads to an offer of a room in exchange for telling her stories, Molly jumps at the chance.
Slowly she builds a new, eccentric family around herself: Tim, her secretive boyfriend, who just might be a spy; Miranda, the lovelorn hairstylist; Liz, the lusty librarian; Mr. Roberts, landlord and listener; and his French wife, Mrs. Roberts.
Much to Molly's surprise, she finds the stories she tells now are her key to creating a completely different life. Suddenly, her future is full of endless possibilities. The trouble is, Molly's not the only one telling tales. And the truth is always stranger than fiction.
Sarah Salway's witty, finely-tuned and poignant story of many stories is a uniquely entrancing chronicle.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Salway's second novel (after The ABCs of Love), much of Molly Drayton's past is held until the end of the narrative. A scandal involving untoward behavior by her father has landed the unhappily overweight Molly without money or connections in an out-of-the-way English suburb. A dirty old man, stationer Mr. Roberts, takes stern pity on her and offers Molly a room above his shop in exchange for some shelving work, albeit with "conditions." The latter include climbing a ladder and spinning stories about her life while Mr. Roberts gropes her ample calves. Molly obliges with more and more elaborate dissembling, which will catch up with her just as she manages to make a few friends in the neighborhood: Miranda, the similarly weight-battling haircutter across the street whose habit of trading compliments with Molly is suspect; attractive, sweet, delusional Tim, who thinks he's a secret agent; and lonely-hearts librarian Liz, who urges Molly to read The Story of O to build character. Salway's characters are deeply estranged from the mainstream and too calculating to be sympathetic, except perhaps Mr. Roberts, married to a Frenchwoman whose attractiveness overtaxes his poor, dirty heart. Salway's book is a frustrating study in the intimate layering of deception.
