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Neon in Daylight
On sale
26th July 2018
Price: £8.99
‘What do you get when a writer of extreme intelligence, insight, style and beauty chronicles the lives of self-absorbed hedonists – The Great Gatsby, Bright Lights, Big City, and now Neon in Daylight. Hermione Hoby held me spellbound’ Ann Patchett, author of COMMONWEALTH
‘Hoby is so good at unpacking all the strange dynamics at work in sex and desire’ Emma Cline, author of THE GIRLS
‘The perfect book with which to while away those hot summer nights’ Independent
‘Expect Gatsby-esque hedonism and lyricism’ Evening Standard
‘You will be transfixed’ The Pool
‘Smart, shimmering … glinting with pocketable images and insights … A vibrant rush of a novel’ Observer
A New York summer so hot the air is turning yellow.
Kate, a young woman newly arrived from London, is determined to become the kind of person who is up for it and down for it – and not remotely troubled over how those two semantically opposed phrases could have come to mean the same thing.
In the sweltering city, she encounters Bill, a once-lauded now booze-sodden novelist, and Inez, his teenage daughter who makes extra cash catering to the sexual fantasies of men she has met online – and falls into a complex infatuation with them both.
‘Hoby is so good at unpacking all the strange dynamics at work in sex and desire’ Emma Cline, author of THE GIRLS
‘The perfect book with which to while away those hot summer nights’ Independent
‘Expect Gatsby-esque hedonism and lyricism’ Evening Standard
‘You will be transfixed’ The Pool
‘Smart, shimmering … glinting with pocketable images and insights … A vibrant rush of a novel’ Observer
A New York summer so hot the air is turning yellow.
Kate, a young woman newly arrived from London, is determined to become the kind of person who is up for it and down for it – and not remotely troubled over how those two semantically opposed phrases could have come to mean the same thing.
In the sweltering city, she encounters Bill, a once-lauded now booze-sodden novelist, and Inez, his teenage daughter who makes extra cash catering to the sexual fantasies of men she has met online – and falls into a complex infatuation with them both.
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Reviews
This debut comes laden with plaudits, the finding-yourself-in-NYC setting evoking almost inevitable comparisons with McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, but in reality this has as much in common with Olivia Laing's memoir, The Lonely City, as it does with those fictional city chroniclers. Neon In Daylight is very much a thing all of its own - you will be transfixed
A gorgeously vibrant story about the thrill and adventure of finding yourself in a new city
Hoby's descriptive language is spectacular, like that of Elif Batuman with a freer spirit or Eve Babitz if she were writing about the opposite coast ... The book is irresistible
A radiant first novel with antecedents in the great novels of the 1970s: Renata Adler's Speedboat, Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays
Beautifully written
In language so vivid that readers could break a sweat in an igloo, debut novelist Hoby brings to life the seamy underworld of bright, bored people during a suffocating New York City summer, demonstrating the sure hand seen in works by Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz
A smart, shimmering study of youthful self-discovery and the power of place, unfurling over the course of a single summer in the city ... the book's prose is impressively precise, glinting with pocketable images and insights .... A vibrant rush of a novel'
Shakespearean in its comings and goings and near misses ... an assured debut that revels in its conjuring of sultry excess
Hoby's skill on the sentence level - along with a keen eye for detail - will catapult her to stardom
Captivating
Hoby's beautifully written story of a complex triangle of relationships plays out in the heat of a New York summer. The perfect book with which to while away those hot summer nights
Hermione Hoby channels the spirit of Joan Didion and the keen observational eye of Ben Lerner to show us the here and now, made luminously real
Highly propulsive reading
Hoby's beautifully written story of a complex triangle of relationships plays out in the heat of a New York summer. The perfect book with which to while away those hot summer nights.
A broiling shimmering NYC is the star of this modern coming-of-age novel, which has made huge waves stateside - expect Gatsby-esque hedonism and lyricism
This book pulses with the sticky heat of summer and sex and power and desire ... a deliriously beautiful tale
Hoby is so good at unpacking all the strange dynamics at work in sex and desire
This book pulses with the sticky heat of summer and sex and power and desire ... a deliriously beautiful tale