Serious Sweet: Longlisted For The Man Booker Prize Hardback

Author : A. L. KennedyProduct Description
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016
How do we value conscience, honesty and tenderness in a world which often seems lacking in them all? Seriously Sweet is a novel that places this question at its centre, redefining what is imperative to how we live our lives honestly and well.
A good man in a bad world, Jon Sigurdsson is 59 and divorced: a senior civil servant in Westminster who hates many of his colleagues and loathes his work for a government engaged in unmentionable acts. A man of conscience.
Meg Williams is 'a bankrupt accountant - two words you don't want in the same sentence, or anywhere near your CV'. She's 45 and shakily sober, living on Telegraph Hill, where she can see London unfurl below her. Somewhere out there is safety. Somewhere out there is Jon, pinballing around the city with a mobile phone and a letter-writing habit he can't break. He's a man on the brink, leaking government secrets and affection as he runs for his life.
Across an impossible chasm, somehow these two damaged, hurting individuals circle towards each other and the faint possibility of love. Over a single day Kennedy takes us inside two peoples lives as they face choices that will have lasting repercussions beyond their own lives.
Serious Sweet portrays intense lives of quiet desperation: it is a novel about longing and muted courage and, at the end of the day, a very tentatively experienced optimism. The Observer
A.L. Kennedy was born in Dundee, she is a writer, stand-up comedian and journalist and an Associate Professor in Creative Writing at The University of Warwick. She has garnered a host of awards for her writing, including winning The Costa Book Awards, Book of the Year in 2007 for her novel Day.

Publisher: Vintage Publishing

ISBN: 9780224098441