Opposed Positions

A spare and stunning new novel from one of England's brightest literary talents

Riley writes with a kind of defeated ecstasy

Although she works on a small canvas, Riley’s work is both intricate and expansive. Her prose is a continual joy to read, and the detail immensely satisfying: she can squeeze more resonance out of a misplaced apostrophe than others can from baroque, technicolour trauma

Riley's appetite for risk-taking and vinegary apercus remains undiminished

This short novel laces its devastating observation of relationships with disturbing maturity. If next year's Orange judging panel doesn't take notice of Riley, it will have missed a trick

Wonderfully spare lyricism and deadpan wit

The dialogue feels very natural and her use of language is sharp and precise

A short, sharp, shockingly brilliant peer down the pen of Aislinn Kelly

Riley's prose often sings, and there are moments of sheer dazzling brilliance here

There was another brilliant curio from Gwendoline Riley, Opposed Positions... Riley writes cool, faintly autobiographical novellas about enigmatic young women who drift, think and write; she wears her influences (Woolf, Fitzgerald, Camus) with impressive insouciance, and this is one of her best

[Riley] shows herself more than up to the job of writing the wasted hinterlands of the human heart

Clean, eminently readable prose and sometimes startling insights

The shifting, uncertain nature of human relationships – and their constant reinterpretation – is reflected in Riley’s understated prose, with moments of intense revelation thrown in like hand grenades.

Gwendoline Riley was born in 1979 and has published four novels: Cold Water, which won a Betty Trask Award, Sick Notes, Joshua Spassky, which was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and won the Somerset Maugham Award, and Opposed Positions.

At thirty, Aislinn Kelly is an occasional novelist with a near-morbid attunement to the motives of those around her. Isolated, restless and stuck, she decamps to America - a default recourse - this time to an attic room in Indianapolis, to attempt once again the definitive act of self-salvage. 
 
There are sharp memories to contend with as the summer heats up, and not least regarding her family history, now revealed as so botched and pitiful it seems it might yet cancel her out. She's spent years evading the attentions of her unstable, bullying father, only to find her mother now cowering in a second rancid marriage. There are also friendships lost or ailing: with bibulous playwright Karl, sly poet Erwin, depressed bookshop-wallah Bronagh, and Aislinn's best friend Cathy, who has recently found God... Finally her thoughts turn to her last encounter with Jim Schmidt, a man she's loved for ten years, hasn't seen for five, yet still has to consider her opposite number in life. 
 
Opposed Positions is a startlingly frank novel about the human predicament, about love and its substitutes, disgraceful or otherwise. Some of these people want to be free - of themselves, of each other - and some have darker imperatives. Wry, shocking, perfectly observed and utterly heart-breaking, the novel moves towards its troubling conclusion: a painful appreciation of what it is we've come from, and what we might be heading for.

Joshua Spassky

'This is a young writer of immense promise' - Literary Review

Riley's prose is as clear, sharp and sobering as her heroine's tonic water. Bubbles of bitter humour burst and repeat on the reader's tongue

Riley writes with a Woolf-ish exactitude... A brilliant and beautiful novel

She is still at her best when she writes  - with great verve and invention - about her home town. She takes the rain that covers Manchester like a tent. And transforms it into something beautiful

A poignant novel of attempted departures... To read Riley is to be trapped inside a consciousness whose self-pity, indulgence and petulance are offset by taut style, wry humour, exactitude of image - a consciousness watching itself

It reads like a hit of espresso, a short intense experience that starts with endings and ends with a declaration of love

Gwendoline Riley was born in 1979 and has published three previous novels: Cold Water, which won a Betty Trask Award; Sick Notes; and, most recently, Opposed Positions.

Joshua and Natalie share a vexed five-year history of sporadic encounters, explosive drunkenness and failed intercourse, spliced with sad intimations of true love. Natalie is attempting to start a new life in Manchester, but when Joshua calls unexpectedly and asks her to meet him in America she knows she has no choice but to go. 
 
Whilst wandering around the Blue Ridge Mountains or lying together for days in their cheap hotel room, they talk about their lives - about his ex-wife, and her dead family - and come to a surprising understanding. 
 
Shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize.

Cold Water

'A beautiful début novel... A real achievement... This is a wise and incisive first novel from a real talent' - Scotsman 
 
Winner of the Betty Trask Award.

Strikingly assured... A writer of unexpected sensibilities and uncompromising originality

Cold Water is a thrilling pleasure... I don't think I've read such a good début in years

Vivid and stylish and endlessly, surprisingly filled with perfect, unexpected images... a beautifully written book, utterly original and the most exciting thing to have been published this year... Fantastic

A truly original new voice in fiction. Her bleakly poetic first novel has an atmosphere all of its own: melancholy and profound yet shot through with the urgency of life and love

Gwendoline Riley was born in 1979 and has published three other novels: Sick Notes, Joshua Spassky, which was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and won the Somerset Maugham Award and, most recently, Opposed Positions.

Carmel McKisco is wry, volatile and full of longing: a twenty-year-old girl working nights in a Manchester dive bar. Cut off from her family, and from Tony, her carefree ex, she forges strange alliances with her customers, and daydreams, half-heartedly, about escaping to Cornwall. 
 
Cold Water is a poignant picaresque of barmaids and barflies; eccentric individuals all somehow tethered to their past - not least Carmel herself, who is nurturing mordant fixations on both her lost love, Tony, and her washed-up adolescent hero: a singer from Macclesfield. As she spins out the days and nights of an unrelentingly rainy winter she finds herself compelled to confront her romantic preoccupations, for better or worse.

Gwendoline Riley

Original and beautifully written... An inspiring book that you won't forget

A blinding follow-up to the award-winning and much-acclaimed Cold Water... A joy to read and a read to treasure and pass on

A portrait of an artist, a writer observing herself living. As such it is quite breathtaking

Riley's prose powerfully articulates the drinking, the depression, the itchy ache of growing up and the misery of first love... One of Britain's most original young writers

This is a young writer of immense promise

Returning to Manchester, her broken home, Esther moves back to the flat she used to share with her best friend Donna. Surrounded by empty gin bottles, with her past life safely taped up in stacked cardboard boxes, she proceeds to turn her back on a 'real world' that seems meaningless and absurd. Instead she lives in her own head. Then she meets Newton, a care-worn American wanderer with a drinker's face and an angel's smile. Newton changes everything. But for how long?

Gwendoline Riley

Praise for Sick Notes

Original and beautifully written... An inspiring book that you won't forget

A blinding follow-up to the award-winning and much-acclaimed Cold Water... A joy to read and a read to treasure and pass on

A portrait of an artist, a writer observing herself living. As such it is quite breathtaking

Original and beautifully written... An inspiring book that you won't forget

A blinding follow-up to the award-winning and much-acclaimed Cold Water... A joy to read and a read to treasure and pass on

A portrait of an artist, a writer observing herself living. As such it is quite breathtaking

Original and beautifully written... An inspiring book that you won't forget

A blinding follow-up to the award-winning and much-acclaimed Cold Water... A joy to read and a read to treasure and pass on

A portrait of an artist, a writer observing herself living. As such it is quite breathtaking

Books by Gwendoline Riley

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