Books by Gwendoline Riley

Returning to Manchester, her broken home, Esther moves back to the flat she used to share with her best friend Donna. Surrounded by empty gin bottles, with her past life safely taped up in stacked cardboard boxes, she proceeds to turn her back on a 'real world' that seems meaningless and absurd.

Finally her thoughts turn to her last encounter with Jim Schmidt, a man she's loved for ten years, hasn't seen for five, yet still has to consider her opposite number in life. Opposed Positions is a startlingly frank novel about the human predicament, about love and its substitutes, disgraceful or otherwise.

Joshua and Natalie share a vexed history of sporadic encounters, explosive drunkenness and failed intercourse, all spliced with the occasional sad intimation of true love. Natalie attempts to start a new life without him in Manchester, but when Joshua calls unexpectedly and asks her to meet him in America she knows she has no choice but to go.

Carmel McKisco is wry, volatile and full of longing: a twenty-year-old girl working nights in a Manchester dive bar. eccentric individuals all somehow tethered to their past - not least Carmel herself, who is nurturing mordant fixations on both her lost love, Tony, and her washed-up adolescent hero: a singer from Macclesfield.