SO I AM GLAD
Jennifer M. Wilson has decided to become a voice. A professional enunciator, an announcer, a voice-over artist, she has retreated into a world of words. Behind the sound-proof double doors of the recording studio she must surely be safe from the painful inconveniences of hate and love. Until reality breaks in.
Words no longer offer an escape, they begin to carry unavoidable meaning, emotion, life and a catalogue of shattering fact. Jennifer uncovers the words her childhood buried and learns the harsh vocabulary of addiction and the addictive extremes of sex. For the first time she can celebrate her loathing of Britain's pathological politics. Above all, she finds herself speaking the unfamiliar words of love. Naked, subversive, terrifying love.
An alchemical romance, a Swiftian satire for our times, an impossible spiritual journey and a devastating plummet into insanity and perversion, So I Am Glad- oblique, incisive, horrific and hilarious by turn- is the finest book yet from this gifted writer.
"Kennedy's deadpan
irony - her dialogues, in particular have a noirish sitcom feel - and
her beautiful, translucent descriptive passages project a dreamlike
aura
over what is finally, despite its narrator's protestations, a moving
story."
Publisher's Weekly
(US)
"... the novel works
because we are given a full-blooded, endearing Martin, a saddened but
decent man, worth Jennifer's holding onto. As the lovers set off for
a
climactic trip to Paris, the reader roots heartily for them, against
all odds."
David Sacks - New
York Times Book Review
"What Kennedy has
done is to take us, with Jennifer, from indifference to passionate, nail-biting
investment in her characters, to unequivocal hope for the future of
a
relationship between a reformed alien and a bioluminescent ghost."
Nell Freudenberger
- Voice Literary Supplement
"It is a resonant
and hopeful moment, for Kennedy and her readers."
Dinah Birch - LRB
"This love may be
unusual, but within an atmosphere of prophetic light and shade, So I
Am Glad is made heartening by an inrush of common, tremulous human
feeling.
Rebecca Gower - Independent
"These lecture notes
for a better and unrealised book are state-of-society art, but her writing's
as tough as ever."
David Hughes -
The Mail on Sunday
"Irish writer spins
fabulous love story"
Ara Taylor - Bellingham
Herald
"It makes you wonder,
not a little apprehensively, what Kennedy will do next."
Kate Hubbard -
Literary Review