What do you think the morning after you have done something reckless, dangerous and demeaning but at the same time edgy, exciting and - it has to be said - sexy? How do you cope with the normality and rigidity of your public service job? How do you reconcile yourself to your own contradictory behaviour? And how can you regret what you have done yet at the same time yearn to do it again and again, especially as what you are doing becomes increasingly dangerous? If half of you wants to live on a sexual knife-edge but the other half doesn't dare, then read this intelligent, introspective, compelling, compulsive book. What are you capable of?
From their first encounter, late one night in an underground car park, a woman is intoxicated by a stranger who seems to overwhelm her quiet life. Despite her better instincts, she cannot help being drawn into a sexually charged and highly volatile relationship. Soon she is driven to the extremes of pleasure – and finally, on a cold and eerie night, has to face up to her fate.
True Things About Me is a brilliantly written novel of survival that reveals simultaneously the strength and vulnerability of an ordinary woman. With great honesty and unexpected humour, Deborah Kay Davies takes us deep into the mind of her unforgettable protagonist, and in doing so asks us to consider seriously what we might sacrifice for our desires.
Deborah Kay Davies has been chosen as one of The Culture Show’s exciting new debut authors (show to air end February).
'Glinting with pitch-black humour, Davies's razor-edged style has a lucidity and ferocity that makes much literary prose sound like soggy mush.' Independent
“Exquisitely written” Daily Express
“A little book that packs a huge punch...Davies handles the horrifying climax with control and assurance.” The Times
“Affecting and well described...[with] searing observations of human behaviour.” Joanna Briscoe, Guardian
“A kind of hybrid of Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing, Maggie O’Farrell’s My Lover’s Lover, and one of Sophie Hannah’s twisted stories. Memorable, troubling and surprisingly funny in places.” Financial Times
“Davies is causing a stir.” Observer
“If darkness has brilliance, this is it.” The Scotsman
Author
About Deborah Kay Davies
Deborah Kay Davies won the Wales Book of the Year 2009 award with her first work of fiction, the short story collection Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful. When her debut novel, True Things About Me, came out in 2010, she was selected by BBC TV as one of the 12 best new British novelists. And when the novel was published in New York in 2011, Lionel Shriver chose it as her personal book of the year. She lives in Cardiff.
