"Charged with emotional tension and eroticism, this enthralling boundary-breaking novel sees a 30-something Briton in New York break her own boundaries and unravel her life."
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.
| Primary Genre | General Fiction |
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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.
How to Be Somebody Else features in the following genres: General Fiction, Debut Books of the Month, Debuts, Star Books, Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Romance / Relationship Stories, Narrative theme: Love and relationships, Fiction, Recommendations, Fiction: narrative themes, Literary Fiction, Literary Fiction
How to Be Somebody Else is available in Paperback, Hardback
How to Be Somebody Else was written by Miranda Pountney and published by Vintage an imprint of Random House
How to Be Somebody Else has 224 pages
£8.99
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