Lovesong [Hardcover]

'Lovesong is a lovely, lyrical creation that has melody and melancholy aching through its sentences... bewitchingly good' Elle, Book of the Month --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

A heartbreaking and mesmerizing story of a young woman's search for love When Lillie Bird was thirteen years old she walked into her parents' home closing the door behind her, shutting out the condemning cries of the small town of Sunshine. With only an outing to Christmas mass once a year, this house was to be her world for the next eight years. On the day she turns twenty one this too-dazzling woman brims with imminent escape and longs to find the world that she has only read about: of men, of love, of brightness. But the town of Sunshine cannot hold Lillie and soon she is drawn to her mother's land, the cold dark English skies, and finally to the scuffed and tumbling London streets. There she finds the pleasure and the sadness in the world she so desperately seeks. This is Nikki Gemmell's finest work to date.

Lillie has come a long way from the shimmering heat, big skies and rocky mountains of her home. A long way not just in terms of distance, but in terms of experience. For it is here in England, a land of cold, scuffed and tumbling streets, that she finds the love she has needed for so long. Lovesong is a romance, but it is also a tightly woven thriller, a sumptuous and truly extraordinary work. Drawing on the themes of displacement and home that threaded through her previous novels, Gemmell has crafted a gripping plot, peopled it with sympathetic characters and enfolded it in language of startling originality and beauty. ‘Lovesong is a lovely, lyrical creation that has melody and melancholy aching through its sentences . . . bewitchingly good’ Elle, Book of the Month ‘A strange and lovely novel . . . The plot, carefully wrought, surprising but utterly convincing, rushes the protagonists across the world and back, through layers of innocence, love, guilt and sacrifice, to the ultimate end – and beyond – to the hope of a new generation’ – The Times ‘An arrestingly strange love story . . . it’s punchy but poetic and above all, heartbreaking’ Glamour, Must-read of the Month ‘One of the few truly original voices to emerge in a long time’ Time Out, NY --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Nikki Gemmell is the author of Shiver and Cleave. She works for BBC Radio and lives in London.