LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
Set in NYC in 2015, Miranda Pountney’s How to Be Somebody Else debut is a spellbinding un-coming-of-age story that sees a 30-something Briton walk out on her career to housesit, rent-free, for an artist, with a vague intention to finally get around to writing.
Pountney’s own writing is incisively sparse, and laced with existential tension as Dylan, feeling that her life is “like a string of accidents”, embarks on an un-doing of her life, driven by a vague need to find the space “to let herself happen.”
With her boyfriend living on the West Coast, in the dark about her resignation and move, Dylan embarks on an affair with a married neighbour, Gabe. Their connection is visceral, they don’t discuss their respective long-term relationships, or their futures.
Then there’s an impending hurricane, both real and symbolic, made all the more symbolic when it’s downgraded to a super storm. Tellingly, this downgrade is disappointing to Dylan, with its “devastation withheld”.
Wily and sometimes shocking, courtesy of Dylan’s recklessness and Gabe’s laissez-faire nonchalance, I loved the observational detail and intimate character portraits, with the author’s sharp eye shining through Dylan. For example: “From the outside, the bar looks like a whore house might in Disneyland.”
In How to Be Somebody Else Miranda Pountney has delivered a showstopping debut performance on the literary stage — I can’t wait to read what she writes next.
Joanne Owen
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How to Be Somebody Else Synopsis
Exquisitely written, sublimely fraught and erotically charged, How to Be Somebody Else is an uncoming-of-age in New York City
Spring 2015, New York.
On the surface Dylan has achieved the impossible - a life in New York, eight years of making this stick. And yet it is not the thing she'd imagined (what had she imagined?). When she walks out of her career, then apartment, and into a housesit for an artist she's never met, she does not tell her friends, her parents back in England, or Matt, her boyfriend, living on the West Coast.
Job-free, rent-free, she'll make good on her book, herself, other things too, she's thinking, when her neighbour Kate shows up and invites her to a party. There she meets Gabe, who happens to be married to Kate but insists, 'it's not a thing'. The affair that follows consumes her and she begins to consider what is fixed and what is variable. Can a person be both? Is Gabe the thing he seems? Is she?
As spring turns to summer, her experiments in living test loyalties and boundaries until an unexpected encounter between the two couples forces her to confront her future.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781787332102 |
| Publication date: |
15th February 2024 |
| Author: |
Miranda Pountney |
| Publisher: |
Jonathan Cape Ltd an imprint of Vintage Publishing |
| Format: |
Hardback |
| Pagination: |
288 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Literary Fiction
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| Other Genres: |
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| Recommendations: |
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Press Reviews
Miranda Pountney Press Reviews
Unsettling and original -- Tessa Hadley, author of After the Funeral
So sharp and well observed. I loved the wry, understated humour, and how perceptive the book is about female desire. In its exploration of a woman trying to make sense of herself it is moving without being sentimental, and clever without seeming to try too hard -- Rebecca Wait, author of I'm Sorry You Feel That Way
A stunning novel. Remarkable and real. Every single line is supercharged with a kind of cerebral eroticism, a zinging inventive intelligence. The sentences buzz and hum -- Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital
Compulsive. It makes its moves with such assurance that it’s hard to believe this is Pountney’s first novel. A wild mess of sex and feeling is here given beautiful form -- Adam Thirlwell, author of The Future Future
