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Cold Light [Hardcover]

Jenn Ashworth (Author)
3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
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Book Description

Publication Date: 28 April 2011

I'm sitting on my couch, watching the local news. There's Chloe's parents, the mayor, the hangers on, all grouped round the pond for the ceremony. It's ten years since Chloe and Carl drowned, and they've finally chosen a memorial - a stupid summerhouse. The mayor has a spade decked out in pink and white ribbon, and he's started to dig.

You can tell from their faces that something has gone wrong. But I'm the one who knows straightaway that the mayor has found a body. And I know who it is.

This is the tale of three fourteen-year-old girls and a volatile combination of lies, jealousy and perversion that ends in tragedy. Except the tragedy is even darker and more tangled than their tight-knit community has been persuaded to believe.

Blackly funny and with a surreal edge to its portrait of a northern English town, Jenn Ashworth's gripping novel captures the intensity of girls' friendships and the dangers they face in a predatory adult world they think they can handle. And it shows just how far that world is willing to let sentiment get in the way of the truth.

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Sceptre (28 April 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1444721445
  • ISBN-13: 978-1444721447
  • Product Dimensions: 14.5 x 3.1 x 22.3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 408,407 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Review

'Ashworth's novel is bleak and gritty, painting an uncompromising portrait of teenage life . . . her prose is equally grim and visceral. In the best possible way this novel is an uncomfortable read.' (Lucy Scholes, Sunday Times Culture )

'That most uncommon delight - a literary page-turner.' (Gary Cansell, Sunday Times )

'Jenn Ashworth's haunting second novel... Cold Light is filled with bruises, bleeding, and psychological bludgeoning. A novel also about the power and pitfalls of narrative, it is told by the hand of a true storyteller.' (Independent )

'A psychological thriller of the first order.' (The Age, Australia )

'pitch-perfect...award-winning Jenn Ashworth leavens a bleak but pacey story with dry, wry humour, resulting in an extraordinarily perceptive and beautifully written novel' (Charlotte Heathcote, Sunday Express )

'Remember teenage bitching and insecurity? This book will take you back there, except with more lies and gruesome murder. Scarily believable.' (Fabulous )

'A wonderful tale, beautifully told.' (Bella )

'a chilling, blackly funny novel with a surreal edge about the intensity of teenage friendship.' (Grazia )

'Another cleverly skewed tale told from the self-conscious perspective of an outsider... arrestingly observant... Ashworth's second book confirms that the first was no one-off... her talent could take her a long way' (Alfred Hickling, Guardian )

'A grimly atmospheric mystery' (Charlotte Heathcote, The Sunday Express )

About the Author

Jenn Ashworth was born in 1982. Her first novel, A Kind of Intimacy, was published in 2009 and won a Betty Trask Award. COLD LIGHT is her second novel. She lives in Preston, Lancashire with her family and writes an award-winning blog at www.jennashworth.co.uk
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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars In the cold light of day, it kind of let me down. 14 Jun 2011
By Brida TOP 500 REVIEWER VINE™ VOICE
Format:Hardcover
Writing this review is one of the hardest I think I have had to do. On the one hand, it is dark, funny and in some ways quite clever. On the other, it has left me underwhelmed. Having read Ashworth's debut novel, A KIND OF INTIMACY, I came to this book with high expectations. However, having now finished it, I have to say that I feel somewhat disappointed. As another reviewer has said, I won't bother giving you a run-down of the plot; the inside flap tells you all that you need to know, and although you read along thinking that there is going to be a twist of some kind, the twist, when it comes, is quite minimal. But that, for me, is not the main problem with this book.

Personally, I felt that the book was not as engaging as A KIND OF INTIMACY. Although from ealry on you could guess the outcome of each of these novels, with A KIND OF INTIMACY, getting to the end was still a satisfying pursuit. Altough the character wasn't exactly likeable in some ways, you were still drawn to her life, watching as her obsession with her neighbour grew. But, with COLD LIGHT, the only thing which made me carry on reading was the expected promise of a clever, shocking plot twist. The twist that doesn't really come.

COLD LIGHT is a chillingly dark, claustrophobic read. Although I think Ashworth manages to pull this genre off well, this particular one left me expecting more. She is still an author I will keep an eye on, and read her next offering, but unfortunately I cannot recommend this book as highly as I did her debut.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Difficult second novel 7 Aug 2012
By Lois Yorke
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Having greatly enjoyed Jenn Ashworth's first novel, I was very much looking forward to reading this.

However,I was disappointed by it. It started well, but the ending was massively underwhelming; almost as if she wasn't quite sure how to end it.

On the plus side, the writing is good, the setting realistic if grim, and the three central girl characters are well drawn. It is a rather dark and in some ways unsettling tale, but I like the fact that this author does not draw back from writing about fairly unlikeable (but interesting) characters. That's all good.

But the plot is somewhat thin and the action is slow. I could buy that, if the ending came with a huge thunmp, that makes you think "What? I never saw that coming!" - but sadly it doesn't. It just...peters out.

I think Jenn Ashworth is a talented writer, and I would read another book by her. I just can't enthuse about this, I'm afraid.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Excellent writing style, slow plot 22 July 2012
By Rossi
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Laura is a lonely young woman with a past and not much else going on in her life and we are taken back ten years to re-live the weeks before the high profile death of her teenage school friend Chloe.

Jenn Ashworth is an excellent scene setter - the attention to detail and observations in her writing style are outstanding. But this is more a book about Laura herself than a fast paced thriller and there's just not that much going on in places. I found that her awkward life with her retired parents was way too heavily featured and didn`t really add much to the plot and the hero worshipping of Chloe ten years on from the local community was overblown and unrealistic.

Loved the writing style, but didn't really enjoy the story.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars better 15 May 2012
By pierre
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is better than the first book, in particular the three protagonists who are an improvement on the earlier obnoxious narrator.It's definitely a Preston novel, featuring the Bus Station, Broadgate, Penwortham Hill, Cuerden Valley and Lower Penwortham with the bridge to Miller and Avenham parks. From the directions and the adjacent leisure centre the school would seem to be Penwortham Priory High. However, overall, the book does not quite gel or convince. The over-fussy punctuation (the semi-colons, all the dashes which are sometimes combined with colons) seems to undermine the shock value of the more radical content -- moody asocial teenage girls, flashers, under-age sex and the weird deaths of the mentally deficient. The shopping centre cleaner/school drop out narrator uses words like whorl/pointillism/topography, makes references to Jane Eyre and muses pretentiously on the present tense which "is full of possibilities" (292)! The language register needs to be more consistent. Still, a small step on the road to the Great Preston Novel!
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Gripping and thoughtful 24 Feb 2011
By Sid Nuncius HALL OF FAME TOP 10 REVIEWER
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)
I thought this was an excellent book - very readable, extremely atmospheric, insightful and memorable. The book begins with the discovery of a body and the circumstances of how it came to be there gradually emerge in an extremely well-told story. It is not a detective story of any kind, but is concerned with the lives of the narrator and two of her school friends and how they came to be involved in the story. It switches easily between the present day and descriptions of events when they were all thirteen in 1997, and I found myself gripped and enthralled throughout.

I don't want to give away any plot details, but I found the story very plausible and the characters extremely well drawn. Jenn Ashworth is excellent at evoking the relationships between teenagers, and I thought truly brilliant in showing the life of a child in a family with a father with mental health problems. The atmosphere of a small City (never named, but with a striking resemblance to Preston) also seemed completely real to me, having spent my teenage years in a comparable city. The book has important things to say about teenage life, families and the effect of guilt both real and imagined, and is also very acute about the public and media response to tragedy.

My one reservation about this book is that I am not sure that someone of the background and education given to the narrator would be able to write so well or make such penetrating observations, but the book was easily good enough to make this seem irrelevant. It's very good indeed and recommended very warmly.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars Cold Light by jen Ashworth
I found this a difficult book to rate. At one level I did not 'like' it. The characters are not very attractive, sad and arousing sympathy but not made to seem attractive as people... Read more
Published 8 days ago by Sue Almond
5.0 out of 5 stars Simply Brilliant
I love this writer, she is a quite new author...this book kept me interested from the first page. The plot turns and twists, a story of lies and fear. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Miss Sunshine
4.0 out of 5 stars A little too realistic for my peace of mind
What chilled me about this novel was the brilliantly realistic way the author portrayed the young people at the heart of this crime. Read more
Published 10 months ago by C. Y. Davidson
4.0 out of 5 stars Solid and evocative
The cover of Jenn Ashworth's second novel (the American cover) is badly misleading and presents as teenage-chick-lit-murder-kitsch trash preening to take itself seriously. Read more
Published 11 months ago by switterbug
2.0 out of 5 stars Boring!
A disappointing and depressing read for me, the plot was slow and boring and I didn't find the main characters likeable. Read more
Published 13 months ago by Bookworm
4.0 out of 5 stars Don't try too hard to be working class!
I felt the author was laying it on a bit thick to convince us that her characters were working class. Read more
Published 15 months ago by Smith
3.0 out of 5 stars A Bit Grim
I didn't find this an easy book to read, and found it easy to distract myself with something else, as I couldn't really get into it. Read more
Published 16 months ago by Basement Cat
4.0 out of 5 stars A page turner.
This is a rare book. Written by an English author about a subject that could only be played out in this way in England. Read more
Published 19 months ago by D. Eastwood
4.0 out of 5 stars Best friends/worst enemies
There seems to be a recent trend for novels which explore the darker side of friendships between young girls, and this is a good (but not the best) example of its type. Read more
Published 20 months ago by J. Dawson
1.0 out of 5 stars I had hoped for better
I don't often do reviews, but I disliked this book so much I felt compelled to.

It's dark, unconfortable and lacking in the comedy promised on the sleeve. Read more
Published 21 months ago by Mrs. J. Mayne
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