 Buy Afloat : Amazon.Ca / Amazon UK (or your nearest seller ISBN13 - 978-0141025841) |
A cross between Dirty Dancing, The Great Gatsby, and Waterworld. Mackinac Island is in the Great Lakes between the US and Canada. Just nine miles round, it has golf courses, expensive restaurants, no cars and plenty of rich people. And for one vodka-fuelled summer it has Bell, a student employed to serve the wealthy. Bell and her fellow waiters and waitresses sample the delights of this earthly paradise: luxurious yachts, alcohol, horse-drawn carriages; and they can't help but come to know each other intimately. But this knowledge comes at a price. For they have each carried with them secrets from the outside world that will not be left behind... A superb debut which offers an exquisitely distilled exploration of North American material and spiritual values - and equally - a riveting story of love, betrayal and survival. (from Five Dials) “Funny, ominous, suspenseful. As with the best current dystopian writing (Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go come to mind), McCartney's Afloat stays rooted in the real, the daily details, the human side of political and environmental inevitability. Often insightful, never sentimental, Afloat is a smart, contemporary debut well worth reading.” Sally Elizabeth Cooper, Globe and Mail, Canada “Fresh, energetic and genuine … reminiscent of The Time Traveller’s Wife.” The List, UK “Hilarious, fascinating, horrifying” “This month’s essential book.” “Powerfully evoked, keeps the reader pleasurably engrossed … the humour and riotous drunkenness throughout this novel [has] a disquieting, sombre edge.” “Afloat contains some of the most evocative writing I’ve read all year.” “Evokes the glad and desperate chaos of Miriam Toews' A Complicated Kindness.” “Tactile, sumptuous, and wholly absorbing, McCartney's devotion to storytelling is more than apparent, making this a compelling read from a first-time novelist.” “This is a deeply moving and evocative debut from a young Canadian novelist with an extremely rosy future. Afloat is a daring yet tenderly-wrought depiction of the confusion of young love.” “An intriguing tale of summer love told in teasing retrospect . . . lovingly evoked, the more so for McCartney's sly humour and the mood-perfect banter” |
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“Afloat has a clean, distinct quality to the prose (a precision, if you will) that brings to mind (to my mind at least) another Canadian writer, Margaret Atwood” “A delicious, sexy, energising read that pulls you headlong into a vodka-fuelled party with the seriousness of adulthood on the fringes . . . Beautifully written.” “For such a young writer, McCartney has an astonishingly mature talent. Her precise, ambitious prose reads with soaring effortlessness. Afloat is an exhilarating debut, a bracing, sassy novel with a hugely poignant core.” “Lively, sexy, often hilarious and ultimately touching—here’s a debut that manages to be both idyllic and dystopian, a book peopled with layered, likeable characters whose dialogue is fresh, whose insights are sharp, and whose story stays with you.” “An appealing debut . . . successfully portraying the eroticism of young love” “Moving, elegantly written, and confident.” |