Riley has been featured in the national media as a star on the
make, and her first novel, a slim but memorable testament to urban
life in the 21st century, provides all the reasons why. She
completed the novel in her early 20s while working bar shifts in
central Manchester and her narrator Carmel McKisco similarly works
in a bar and is in her early 20s. It gets harder to draw
resemblances past that, although it must be said that on first
appearances Riley like Carmel seems to be a girl whose carapace of
cool is seamlessly sewn. As readers, of course, we're let into
Carmel's private world, where we see she's not as sorted as she
appears. Early in the book she tells us her dad died when she was
14. 'I found him, sitting stiffly on the settee when I came in
late, one night, his eyes open behind his glasses, Guardian on his
knee and an ashtray balanced on the arm of his chair. I clicked off
the hissing TV and sat down next to him. I wasn't upset. I felt
relieved. For us and for him.' This economy of style, with its
astute juxtapositions of emotion, sensation and factual detail,
runs as the backbone to the narrative. Not much happens, in fact.
Carmel daydreams a lot about Tony, her ex-boyfriend, but when she
does eventually get back together with him, she knows it won't
work. She takes trips; she tells us about her wardrobe. She tells
in wistful word-pictures of urban drifting, with brief flames of
friendship turning into ashy semi-connection with half-strangers.
When her friend Katja admits to having 'run out of energy... every
morning when I go down to collect my mail, I say to myself please
please today let there be something in the post that's going to
change my life', Carmel is brought up short by this also-truth
about her life. 'I stopped hanging out with her so much after
that.' Riley mercilessly delineates the gaps between Carmel's outer
shell and inner thoughts, her fantasy and her lived experience, and
presents us with a narrative both compelling and wise. (Kirkus UK)
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, her own Elysian Fields. 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.
Confident, fresh, and completely original, Cold Water has a voice to match - whether sharp or sentimental, tender or sassy, elegant or dryly sardonic. Peopled with memorable characters and imbued with a subtle sense of longing and raw loneliness beneath the banter and whimsy, this thrilling debut is as cool and assured as Carmel herself - a funny, memorable and strangely affecting look at the way people drift into and out of each other's lives, and how they find their place in the world.
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