2011 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (nominee)
From the award-winning author of Hotel World and The Accidental, a dazzling, funny, and wonderfully exhilarating new novel.
At a dinner party in the posh London suburb of Greenwich, Miles Garth suddenly leaves the table and locks himself in an upstairs room, communicating only through notes slipped under the door to his involuntary hosts, the Lee family. In an act of desperation, Genevieve Lee summons Anna, a woman Miles knew briefly as a teenager, in the hope that she might be able to lure him out. Anna quickly finds herself thrust into the chaotic and surreal world of the Lees: their precocious nine-year-old neighbor, Brooke; their dinner guest Mark; and May, an elderly woman living nearby. Though each of these characters knows Miles only slightly, his self-imposed isolation will serve as the central event linking them to one another and to their own pasts.
Brilliantly audacious, disarmingly playful, full of Smith's trademark wit and puns, There But For The is a deft exploration of the human need for separation - from our pasts and from one another - and the redemptive possibilities for connections. It is a tour de force by one of our finest writers.
Genre: Literary Fiction
At a dinner party in the posh London suburb of Greenwich, Miles Garth suddenly leaves the table and locks himself in an upstairs room, communicating only through notes slipped under the door to his involuntary hosts, the Lee family. In an act of desperation, Genevieve Lee summons Anna, a woman Miles knew briefly as a teenager, in the hope that she might be able to lure him out. Anna quickly finds herself thrust into the chaotic and surreal world of the Lees: their precocious nine-year-old neighbor, Brooke; their dinner guest Mark; and May, an elderly woman living nearby. Though each of these characters knows Miles only slightly, his self-imposed isolation will serve as the central event linking them to one another and to their own pasts.
Brilliantly audacious, disarmingly playful, full of Smith's trademark wit and puns, There But For The is a deft exploration of the human need for separation - from our pasts and from one another - and the redemptive possibilities for connections. It is a tour de force by one of our finest writers.
Genre: Literary Fiction
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