Very Cold People

Sarah Manguso

From Shelf: HB fiction publishing w/c 25th April

Acclaimed writer Sarah Manguso makes her fiction debut with an icy, furious novel about the way in which a society can ignore and enable the abuse of young women, narrated by the daughter of just such an abusive mother.

Longlisted for the Wingate PrizeFinancial Times Best DebutsGuardian's Best Fiction of the YearOnce home to the country's most illustrious families, Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is now an unforgiving place awash with secrets. Forged in this frigid landscape, Ruthie learns how the town's prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history and how silence often masks a legacy of harm - from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends.In Very Cold People Sarah Manguso reveals the suffocating constraints of growing up in a very old, and very cold, small town. Here lies a vital confrontation with an all-American whiteness where the ice of emotional restraint meets the embers of smouldering rage . . .'I can't think of a writer who is at once so formally daring and so rigorously uncompromising as Sarah Manguso' - Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man