![]() ![]() A vulgar, glittering pirate of a man, all jewellery and fake tan, gold glinting in his ears, on his fingers and round his wrists. He mocks everyone including himself and when he sees Darian dancing at a gay bar in Essex (Ash, who never leaves his apartment if he doesn’t have to, is there for a friend’s stag party he was unable to avoid), he labels him as a risible rube. He is also an intellectual from Britain’s upper class (he’s a Cambridge grad), a successful writer, wealthy enough to never worry about money, and a snob. ![]() Ash is seriously mentally ill and is recovering from a fairly recent psychotic breakdown. The narrator of Glitterland is Ash Winters and he is not a nice man. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this summer and, I think, the best debut novel of the year thus far. Glitterland is a romance, complete with compelling leads, steamy love scenes, and a hard-won Happy For Now ending. I think you’ll be impressed.” (This is clearly a better response than calling someone a judgmental prat.) The next time someone sniffs derisively at romance novels, rather than roll my eyes and pray for patience, I plan to say, “Ah, I see you haven’t read Glitterland. The language he uses – his metaphors are often show stoppingly gorgeous – and his narrator, a bipolar depressive – beg to be read by those who dismiss genre fiction as lowly. It would be easy label Alexis Hall’s debut novel Glitterland as literary fiction masquerading as romance. ![]()
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