First Love, Gwendoline Riley
First Love, Gwendoline Riley
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First Love

Author: Gwendoline Riley

Narrator: Esther Wane

Unabridged: 4 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/11/2022

Synopsis

Catastrophically ill-suited for each other, and forever straddling a line between relative calm and explosive confrontation, Neve and her husband, Edwyn, live together in London. For the moment they have reached a place of peace in their relationship, but past battles have left scars. As Neve recalls the decisions that brought her to Edwyn, she describes other loves and other debts—from her bullying father and her self-involved mother, to a musician she struggled to forget. Drawing us into the battleground of this marriage, Gwendoline Riley tells a transfixing story of mistakes and misalliances, of helplessness and hostility, in which both husband and wife have played a part. Could this possibly be, nonetheless, a story of love?

About Gwendoline Riley

Gwendoline Riley is an English writer born in London. Her novel First Love won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Literature, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Gordon Burn Prize. In 2018, the London Times Literary Supplement named her one of the twenty best British and Irish novelists working today.

About Esther Wane

Esther Wane is a British actor and voice-over artist. After a career in finance, she fulfilled a childhood dream of going to drama school in London, and her life as an actor began at age forty. She has a lifelong passion for literature and can often be found browsing bookshops during any spare moments. Wane enjoys taking her listeners on a journeys in time and space and bringing the characters on the page to life in their imagination. She lives with her family and collection of books in Hertfordshire, just outside London.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Hannah

Click here to watch a video review of this book on my channel, From Beginning to Bookend. Thirty-three-year-old Neve is trapped in a toxic marriage. As she recounts the corrosive relationships of her past - with her neurotic and self-centered mother, her short-tempered father, and a fickle ex-lover -......more

Goodreads review by Paul

Now winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Fiction The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse —The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness......more

Goodreads review by Meike

Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Goldsmiths Prize for experimental writing, "First Love" is a rather short novel that will nevertheless haunt its reader long after closing the book. The story is told from the perspective of 35-year-old Neve who examines her relationship......more

Quotes

“At the heart of Gwendoline Riley’s short, dark, funny novel is a marriage in which bullying self-pity and perplexed self-abasement collide in a series of savage little jousts that ought to be unbearable to witness, but are in fact mesmerizing and perversely tender.” New York Times Book Review

“Gwendoline Riley [is] a fascinating novelist…She takes a familiar theme of midlife minor angst and focuses in, closer and closer, until the banal becomes surreal, even beautiful. The effect is beguiling…First Love is an exquisite and combative piece of news from nowhere—which is everywhere, too.” The Guardian

“Almost impossible to turn away from.” New Statesman (UK)

“Gwendoline Riley writes beautifully and memorably. First Love is evocative, often funny, and very moving.” David Szalay, author of All That Man Is

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