My Phantoms

Technically brilliant, this, I concede. It's not long, and Riley can say a lot, and draw an incisive picture in very few words. But my question, really, is why? A portrait of a toxic and damaged family, yes, but also a family which functions, after its fashion. One at least of the daughters has cut herself off from the mother, with the exception of an annual.birthday visit. She even complains about this, because it happens in February, when the weather's usually rubbish. The mother, quite reasonably, becomes a little plaintive about this on.occasion. Is that supposed to be funny? The daughter, and her barely-seen partner, come across as insufferably smug. One of them.is.even vegan. Sorry, but I found this book a technically accomplished, and very unkind, portrait. I'm almost sorry I read it.

Genre: Literary Fiction

"I read My Phantoms with great pleasure. It's a wonderful combination of achingly sad and subversively funny, simultaneously sharp and tender, and always finely observed. The dialogue is pitch perfect. The relationships are agonising. It's a subtle book, with big themes lightly drawn and precisely rendered, about how to live and how to love." - Monica Ali

"What a phenomenal ear she has, and how remorselessly funny she is My Phantoms is unmissably good." - Kevin Barry

"Devastated by this novel. Gwendoline Riley can draw character like nobody else. The weight each pristine, witty sentence carries! This is life, its aches, its silences, its love, what is carried and left unsaid. Her prose is so sharp you could cut yourself on it." - Elizabeth Macneal

"My Phantoms is the funniest and bleakest book I have read in a long time. It's also the most moving unexpectedly, perhaps, as it sets about capturing the awful comedy of a particularly English kind of sourness: one that takes perverse delight in disappointment and calamity. Gwendoline Riley's talent for making characters live, and her skill for identifying the essential moment, word or gesture, is immense." - Chris Power