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Getting Colder
On sale
3rd September 2015
Price: £8.99
Encore Award, 2015
They were colour-supplement darlings of the 1980s: Patrick, the sexy, ferocious young playwright, scourge of an enthralled establishment, and Sara, who abandoned her two children to fulfil her destiny as Patrick’s beautiful, devoted wife and muse.
Thirty-five years later, Sara’s death leaves Patrick alone in their crumbling house in Cornwall, with his whisky, his writer’s block and his undimmed rage against the world. But bereavement is no respecter of life’s estrangements, and Sara’s children, Louise and Nigel, are now adults, with memories, questions and agendas of their own. What was their mother really like? Why did she leave them? What has she left them? And how can Patrick carry on without the love of his life?
Getting Colder is a painfully funny and perceptive novel about family, love, and how sometimes the harder you look, the less you find.
Thirty-five years later, Sara’s death leaves Patrick alone in their crumbling house in Cornwall, with his whisky, his writer’s block and his undimmed rage against the world. But bereavement is no respecter of life’s estrangements, and Sara’s children, Louise and Nigel, are now adults, with memories, questions and agendas of their own. What was their mother really like? Why did she leave them? What has she left them? And how can Patrick carry on without the love of his life?
Getting Colder is a painfully funny and perceptive novel about family, love, and how sometimes the harder you look, the less you find.
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Reviews
A savage family saga with lots to say about England today
Dysfunctional family drama at its most satisfying: think Death at a Funeral meets Anne Enright's The Green Road with a dash of David Nicholls' dry wit
Brims over with trenchant observation, emotional truth and bitter wit
The brilliant What They Do in the Dark was always going to be a hard act to follow, but Getting Colder has once again proved that Coe's a fearless writer, not afraid to linger in the murky, messy corners of her characters' lives
An uncomfortable but brilliantly acute reading of grief, self-interest and the persistence of old wounds
Ferociously funny . . . rings all too painfully true
Blackly comic . . . crisply plotted and filled with pleasurably sharp observations
An acutely observed family drama . . . darkly humorous