An uncoming-of-age in New York City
‘How to Be Somebody Else has literary oomph’ SUNDAY TIMES
‘Brilliant… Luscious prose’ ANNIE LORD, author of Notes on Heartbreak
‘Unsettling and original’ TESSA HADLEY, author of Free Love
Spring 2015, New York.
On the surface Dylan has achieved the impossible - a life in New York, eight years of making this stick. And yet it is not the thing she'd imagined (what had she imagined?). When she walks out of her career, then apartment, and into a housesit for an artist she's never met, she does not tell her friends, her parents back in England, or Matt, her boyfriend, living on the West Coast.
Job-free, rent-free, she'll make good on her book, herself, other things too, she's thinking, when her neighbour Kate shows up and invites her to a party. There she meets Gabe, who happens to be married to Kate but insists, 'it's not a thing'. The affair that follows consumes her and she begins to consider what is fixed and what is variable. Can a person be both? Is Gabe the thing he seems? Is she?
As spring turns to summer, her experiments in living test loyalties and boundaries until an unexpected encounter between the two couples forces her to confront her future.
***A MARIE CLAIRE BEST BOOK OF 2024***
Genre: Literary Fiction
‘How to Be Somebody Else has literary oomph’ SUNDAY TIMES
‘Brilliant… Luscious prose’ ANNIE LORD, author of Notes on Heartbreak
‘Unsettling and original’ TESSA HADLEY, author of Free Love
Spring 2015, New York.
On the surface Dylan has achieved the impossible - a life in New York, eight years of making this stick. And yet it is not the thing she'd imagined (what had she imagined?). When she walks out of her career, then apartment, and into a housesit for an artist she's never met, she does not tell her friends, her parents back in England, or Matt, her boyfriend, living on the West Coast.
Job-free, rent-free, she'll make good on her book, herself, other things too, she's thinking, when her neighbour Kate shows up and invites her to a party. There she meets Gabe, who happens to be married to Kate but insists, 'it's not a thing'. The affair that follows consumes her and she begins to consider what is fixed and what is variable. Can a person be both? Is Gabe the thing he seems? Is she?
As spring turns to summer, her experiments in living test loyalties and boundaries until an unexpected encounter between the two couples forces her to confront her future.
***A MARIE CLAIRE BEST BOOK OF 2024***
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"Unsettling and original." - Tessa Hadley
"A stunning novel. Remarkable and real. Every single line is supercharged with a kind of cerebral eroticism, a zinging inventive intelligence. The sentences buzz and hum." - Samantha Harvey
"Compulsive. It makes its moves with such assurance that it's hard to believe this is Pountney's first novel. A wild mess of sex and feeling is here given beautiful form." - Adam Thirlwell
"So sharp and well observed. I loved the wry, understated humour, and how perceptive the book is about female desire. In its exploration of a woman trying to make sense of herself it is moving without being sentimental, and clever without seeming to try too hard." - Rebecca Wait
"A stunning novel. Remarkable and real. Every single line is supercharged with a kind of cerebral eroticism, a zinging inventive intelligence. The sentences buzz and hum." - Samantha Harvey
"Compulsive. It makes its moves with such assurance that it's hard to believe this is Pountney's first novel. A wild mess of sex and feeling is here given beautiful form." - Adam Thirlwell
"So sharp and well observed. I loved the wry, understated humour, and how perceptive the book is about female desire. In its exploration of a woman trying to make sense of herself it is moving without being sentimental, and clever without seeming to try too hard." - Rebecca Wait
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Used availability for Miranda Pountney's How to Be Somebody Else