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The Palm House

The Palm House

by Gwendoline Riley

$16.95
$16.95
Available as E-Book Fiction Literature in English
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Laura Miller and Edmund Putnam have been friends for a long time. Theirs is a happy meeting of minds, with long evenings spent huddled in an ancient pub by the Thames, where they share office gossip, reflect on their teenage passions, and lament the state of the world.

Recently, though, Putnam has been harder to reach: He has lost his father, and the magazine to which he has dedicated his life has been hijacked by an insufferable new editor, Simon “call me Shove” Halfpenny.

Laura has her own problems: Living in London, a beautiful but also indifferent city, with a prickly mother to manage and a tricky past to contemplate, she finds that day-to-day life presents its difficulties. And as Putnam starts to sink into despondency, she must try to bring him back.

A novel of enduring friendships and small mercies, The Palm House offers us Gwendoline Riley’s trademark keen observation and wit, and leaves us with a sense of possibility.

Additional Book Information

Series: New York Review Books
ISBN: 9798896230526
Pages: 224
Publication Date:

Praise

Outstandingly brilliant.
—Claire-Louise Bennett

Gwendoline Riley is one of my favourite contemporary writers and The Palm House is the book of hers I love the most.
—Sheila Heti

One has the sense, reading Riley, of being involved in an alarming experiment, that of reading the world without the slightest mercy or compromise. . . . We truly see her characters, in their descriptive nakedness, alive and horridly vivid.
—James Wood, The New Yorker

Riley has occasionally been misread through a lens of trendy melancholia. But her work, especially since the breakthrough of First Love, more closely resembles the sturdy yet delicate realism of the 19th century—Chekhov, Stendhal—in which mundane objects, landscapes and exchanges are imbued with rich layers of social and psychological meaning. . . . Like Mary Gaitskill she is a moralist.
—Lidija Haas, The New York Times Book Review

Riley has a spy’s attention to detail and a great and terrible power to re-create tics, pretensions, and the painfully recognizable human tendency to wallow in delusion.
—Rachel Connolly, New York magazine

If you need any further proof that Gwendoline Riley is one of our finest prose stylists, look no further than her eighth book, The Palm House. She writes slender, scorching stories that capture the humour and pathos of ordinary English lives in unflinching detail and painfully funny dialogue.
—Madeleine Feeny

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