First Love

Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction

Catastrophically ill-suited for each other, and forever straddling a line between relative calm and explosive confrontation, Neve and her husband, Edwyn, live together in London. For the moment they have reached a place of peace in their relationship, but past battles have left scars. As Neve recalls the decisions that brought her to Edwyn, she describes other loves and other debts--from her bullying father and her self-involved mother, to a musician she struggled to forget.

Drawing us into the battleground of this marriage, Gwendoline Riley tells a transfixing story of mistakes and misalliances, of helplessness and hostility, in which both husband and wife have played a part. Could this possibly be, nonetheless, a story of love?

Gwendoline Riley’s debut novel Cold Water was published when she was still at university and won a Betty Trask Award for first time novelists. Riley is also the author of Sick Notes, Joshua Spassky (which won the Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), and Opposed Positions. She lives in London.