From Kirkus Reviews
In a loosely threaded first novel, Scottish writer Smith luminously evokes the long, dark shadow cast by obsessions born in adolescence. Two young women, Amy Scone and Ash McCarthy, meet as teenagers when Amy's British family spends a summer vacation in Scotland next door to Ash. Eventually, the two will meet up again in Cambridge, where Amy has become a distinguished scholar; but as the story begins, the girls have been separated for many years. How that happenedand when, and whyis never made clear except through scattered hints here and there. At the start, Amy, caretaker for a seaside camping ground in Scotland, is living with eight-year-old Kate in a decrepit caravan. Kate, a clever child whose parentage is suggested but never established, has been put to work deciphering letters and whatnot for Amy, who is herself (unaccountably) no longer able to read and suffers from inexplicable fugue states. Later, just as inexplicably, Amy gradually finds her ability to read returning. She visits her wealthy and accomplished English parents for the first time in years; borrows money to take a trip with Kate to Italy; and, once settled back in Scotland, begins reinventing her life, with her old demons, so it would seem, safely banished. Meanwhile, the diary of 26-year-old Ash, a famous actress, at home in Scotland before heading to the US, is a long narrative riff on her compulsive love for Amy, which has never altered despite various affairs with other women. Trying to make sense of herself, her family, and her never-ending Amy-philia, Ash comes up with unsatisfying similes suggesting, for instance, with a flossy patness, that whatever happens it is always like something elseonly, Amy's heart, as she once heard it, was really not like anything else. Lyrical but elliptical writing that ultimately bleeds the pain and passion out. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Ali Smith is a writer, born in 1962 in Inverness, Scotland, to working-class parents. She was raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at Aberdeen, and then at Cambridge, for a Ph.D. that was never finished. In a 2004 interview with writing magazine Mslexia, she talked briefly about the difficulty of becoming ill with chronic fatigue syndrome and how it forced her to give up her job as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde to focus on what she really wanted to do: writing. Openly gay, she has been with her partner Sarah Wood for 20 years.
