Author(s): Gwendoline Riley

Novel

An electric, compelling, often painfully funny portrait of family relationships, which shows the damage we can do in the course of a life. From the Women's Prize-Shortlisted author of First Love Helen Grant has always been a mystery to her daughter. Twice-divorced, with few friends, her desire to join in is matched only by her need to stand apart. As Bridget looks back over their fractious relationship, she is forced to confront the cruelties inflicted on both sides. My Phantoms is an insightful, compelling and painfully funny account of a family strained to breaking point; a reckoning with the damage we do over the course of a life. 'What a phenomenal ear she has, and how remorselessly funny she is - My Phantoms is unmissably good ' - Kevin Barry, author of Night Boat to Tangier

Review: 'My Phantoms is the funniest and bleakest book I have read in a longtime. It's also the most moving - unexpectedly, perhaps, as it sets aboutcapturing the awful comedy of a particularly English kind of sourness: onethat takes perverse delight in disappointment and calamity. Gwendoline Riley'stalent for making characters live, and her skill for identifying theessential moment, word or gesture, is immense' - Chris Power, author ofMOTHERS

Author Biography: GWENDOLINE RILEY was born in London in 1979 and has been hailed as one of the most significant young British writers. She is is the author of First Love, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Literature, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Cold Water, Sick Notes, Joshua Spassky and Opposed Positions. She has also been awarded a Betty Trask Award and a Somerset Maugham Award, and has been shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In 2018, the Times Literary Supplement named her as one of the twenty best British and Irish novelists working today.