From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. When a dull neighbor asks Hannah Luckraft what she does for a living, Hannah can barely refrain from answering honestly: "Oh, a little theft, monstrosity, credit-card fraud, and my hobbies include giving blow jobs to unpleasant men while I'm semi-unconscious. I also drink a lot." With her fifth novel, Kennedy proves herself—again—to be a master of extracting searing beauty from patently ugly truths. Awash in whisky, 30-year-old narrator Hannah is the consummate professional screwup: she drinks with ferocity and harbors no pretenses about her self-destructive impulses or their horrendous consequences. Her wry, wary commentary has no right to be anything but gut-wrenchingly sad, yet her savage wit and chilling self-awareness transform even unspeakable misery into something howlingly funny. Blacking out becomes "master[ing] the art of escaping from linear time," rehab is reduced to "being slapped down into a grisly ring of pink Naugahyde armchairs and made to discuss [our] personal lives with a dozen emotional vampires" and paradise itself is revealed to be "an untouched bottle and the man who loves me, the man I love." Of course, Hannah knows that happiness can't last, so when a charming drunk named Robert stumbles into her life, her bed and her head, no one dares to hope for a happy ending. Their thirst for oblivion, sobriety and oblivion again is the story of paradise found and lost a thousand times over. "How it happens is a long story, always," but rarely is it so jaw-droppingly good as this. (Mar. 14) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
The seductive pain and sinister pleasures of alcoholism have rarely been more powerfully depicted than in Kennedy's profound and provocative tale of one woman's descent into despair, oblivion, and madness. Approaching 40, fitfully employed, and estranged from her family, Hannah is a hapless denizen of local pubs, hotel bars, airport lounges--anywhere she can score a drink. Her best friends are Johnny Walker and Jack Daniels, their golden hues her source of sunlight, their shiny labels more precious than jewels. And they're even more delightful when enjoyed with Robert, a fellow alcoholic whose love Hannah needs almost as badly as she does the booze. The cause of Hannah's alcoholism is never clear, but what matters is that any attempts at sobriety, whether self-imposed or enforced, only serve to heighten and hasten Hannah's relentless spiral toward an abyss. Suffering paralyzing blackouts and petrifying hallucinations, Hannah is out of control. In Kennedy's masterful hands, however, such torment is the stuff of poetry. There's humor amid the horror of Hannah's dissolution, a sublime pathos balanced by a gritty realism, in which Kennedy continually astounds the reader with her language. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
From the Inside Flap
From one of Britain’s most acclaimed novelists, a comic but terrifying love story about two alcoholics alternately battling and embracing their addiction, and each other.
Everything in Hannah Luckraft’s life is tinted amber: her dreary job selling cardboard boxes; her strained relations with a beloved younger brother, who is about to give up on her; and especially her incipient relationship with Robert, a man who understands what it is to drink. They become constant companions, and she drinks up his tender affection with the same soul-ravaged thirst she brings to her search for paradise–the paradise of self-annihilation, a reprieve from the howling loneliness and difficulty of waking life. Together and then alone, she and Robert spiral through the beauty and depravity of a love affair with alcohol and with each other. From Scotland to Montreal, and onward, Hannah travels beyond her limits, beyond herself, in search of the ultimate altered state, the place where she can be happy: her paradise.
No one writes with greater intelligence about the human predicament, about the comic dilemmas of consciousness and the mind divided against itself, and no young writer brings a greater gift of language to our concurrent pursuits of debasement and ascension. Paradise is a novel of dark extremes, rich in emotion–Kennedy’s most gripping and immediate work of fiction yet.
About the Author
A. L. Kennedy lives in Glasgow. She has received many prizes for her work, including the Somerset Maugham Award, the Encore Award, and the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award.
A. L. Kennedy’s Indelible Acts, Original Bliss, So I Am Glad, Everything You Need, and On Bullfighting are available in Vintage paperback.
Paradise FROM THE PUBLISHER
Everything in Hannah Luckraft's life is tinted amber: her dreary job selling cardboard boxes; her strained relations with a beloved younger brother, who is about to give up on her; and especially her incipient relationship with Robert, a man who understands what it is to drink. They become constant companions, and she drinks up his tender affection with the same soul-ravaged thirst she brings to her search for paradise - the paradise of self-annihilation, a reprieve from the howling loneliness and difficulty of waking life. Together and then alone, she and Robert spiral through the beauty and depravity of a love affair with alcohol and with each other. From Scotland to Montreal, and onward, Hannah travels beyond her limits, beyond herself, in search of the ultimate altered state, the place where she can be happy: her paradise.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
When a dull neighbor asks Hannah Luckraft what she does for a living, Hannah can barely refrain from answering honestly: "Oh, a little theft, monstrosity, credit-card fraud, and my hobbies include giving blow jobs to unpleasant men while I'm semi-unconscious. I also drink a lot." With her fifth novel, Kennedy proves herself-again-to be a master of extracting searing beauty from patently ugly truths. Awash in whisky, 30-year-old narrator Hannah is the consummate professional screwup: she drinks with ferocity and harbors no pretenses about her self-destructive impulses or their horrendous consequences. Her wry, wary commentary has no right to be anything but gut-wrenchingly sad, yet her savage wit and chilling self-awareness transform even unspeakable misery into something howlingly funny. Blacking out becomes "master[ing] the art of escaping from linear time," rehab is reduced to "being slapped down into a grisly ring of pink Naugahyde armchairs and made to discuss [our] personal lives with a dozen emotional vampires" and paradise itself is revealed to be "an untouched bottle and the man who loves me, the man I love." Of course, Hannah knows that happiness can't last, so when a charming drunk named Robert stumbles into her life, her bed and her head, no one dares to hope for a happy ending. Their thirst for oblivion, sobriety and oblivion again is the story of paradise found and lost a thousand times over. "How it happens is a long story, always," but rarely is it so jaw-droppingly good as this. (Mar. 14) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Kennedy's (Everything You Need) new novel is about a love affair, not so much between seemingly hopeless drunks Hannah Luckraft and dentist Robert Gardener but about Hannah's love affair with alcohol. Her knowledge of "drink"-the different kinds, their varying amounts, and the type of "drunk" each can produce-is striking, as is the damage caused by continuous imbibing, from mysterious physical ailments to wrecked familial relationships to soul-shattering encounters with others. Hannah and Robert feed off each other (dentists are sometimes seen as harm-inflictors) while at times attempting to stop their destructive behavior-though never at the same time and never with any success. Kennedy's prose is as smooth as "a drink pouring, hurrying in to ease a thirst," but Hannah's thoughts and the daily and nightly minutiae of her life are sometimes hard to endure. Although compelling at times, this book is ultimately someone else's long nightmare-the one you don't necessarily want to hear. Suitable for larger public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/04.]-Jyna Scheeren, Manatee Cty. Central Lib., Bradenton, FL Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Good writing essentially redeems a potentially self-defeating subject in the Scottish author's absorbing fourth: a first-person chronicle of alcoholism that's equal parts despairing, funny, and intermittently tiresome. Protagonist Hannah Luckraft (whose surname vibrates with suggestions of repeated false hopes amid serial wreckage) is a 30ish underachiever who still lives with her frustrated but indulgent parents, loses successive jobs (pointedly, that of sales rep for a cardboard-manufacturing company), has unsatisfying sex with nondescript dominant males, and drinks-Lord, how she drinks. The 14 chapters here doubtless connote the Stations of the Cross (one character refers to them rather obtrusively), but it's hard to decide whether Hannah is one of those Dostoevsky called the "insulted and injured," or a detached sardonic observer of her own ruinous flaws ("I am enough to make one miserable. I am too much to bear"). In any case, she keeps right on her way to hell, tormenting her long-suffering mum (a nice crisp characterization) and self-righteous younger brother, and making a mess of a chance for possible happiness with her fellow souse and sometime lover, dentist Robert Gardener. Paradise (the blissful state Hannah seeks in alcohol) is sometimes gloomy and redundant (there are echoes of Jean Rhys and Malcolm Lowry, and a hint of her countryman Alasdair Gray's far livelier 1982, Janine), more often buoyed by Kennedy's flinty descriptive skills and bracing black humor. Fortunately, the general malaise is broken up by such beguiling set pieces as Hannah's residence at a Dickensian rehab clinic and a climactic train journey whose grotesque details suggest a fusion of Hieronymus Bosch andIrvine Welsh. Kennedy (Indelible Acts, 2003, etc.) is a risk-taker, and her fiction often succeeds in inverse proportion to its formal smoothness and symmetry. It rambles, and it's a downer. But there's a real kick to it. Agent: Antony Harwood/Antony Harwood Ltd.
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