Serious Sweet
Author(s): A L Kennedy
A good man in a bad world, Jon Sigurdsson is fifty-nine and divorced, a senior civil servant in London who hates many of his colleagues and loathes his work for a government engaged in unmentionable acts.
Meg Williams is a bankrupt accountant two words you don't want in the same sentence, or anywhere near your resume. She's forty-five and shakily sober, living on Telegraph Hill in London, where she can see the city unfurl below her.
Somewhere out there is Jon, pinballing around the city with a cell phone and a letter-writing habit he can t break. He s a man on the brink, leaking government secrets and affection for a woman he barely knows as he runs for his life.
Poignant, deeply funny, and beautifully written, Serious Sweet is about two decent, damaged people trying to make moral choices in an immoral world, ready to sacrifice what s left of themselves for honesty and for a chance at tenderness. As Jon and Meg navigate the sweet and serious heart of London passing through twenty-four hours that will change them both forever they tell an unusual and moving love story.
Product Information
Longlisted for the Man Booker 2016
"So beautiful that it makes your head hurt." -- Katy Guest Independent
"Serious Sweet is a magnificent novel, showing Kennedy at the very top of her game. Ambitious in scope, daring in execution, full of dazzling apercus and dark comedy... It is a tale of redemption, as serious and as sweet as you could wish for." -- Rebecca Abrams Financial Times
"A. L. Kennedy shakes her city until the right atoms collide. She stands back to give a picture of the whole of London on one day, and then suddenly swoops down to pick up a tiny detail." -- Kate Saunders The Times
"Deeply affecting... Kennedy strips her characters emotionally bare... Serious Sweet portrays intense lives of quiet desperation: it is a novel about hope and muted courage and, at the end of the day, a very tentatively experienced optimism." -- Hannah Beckerman Observer
"A. L. Kennedy's eighth novel is a profoundly moving, often funny, and at points rending depiction of two good people. Serious Sweet is about the heroism of decency; albeit damaged decency... Kennedy is not one of our finest writers simply because of the quality of her prose: she is because of the moral profundity of her work." -- Stuart Kelly Scotsman
A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards - including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in London and is a part-time lecturer in creative writing at Warwick University.
General Fields
- :
- : Little a
- : Little a
- : 01 October 2016
- : United States
- : books
Special Fields
- : A L Kennedy
- : Paperback / softback
