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“... but parents – old, decrepit, dying or recently deceased – have seemed inescapable of late. Gwendoline Riley’s recent novels are a case in point. In First Love (2017) the narrator, Neve, contends with her galling, gallivanting mother while coming to the realisation that the sickly older man she married in the wake of her vicious father’s death ...”

“... To find​ Gwendoline Riley in her novels wouldn’t be hard, but it would be unrewarding. ‘People have the right to disappear if they want to,’ says Carmel, the narrator of her first. Cold Water, set in a Manchester dive bar, appeared in 2002 when Riley was 23. Since then she has published five more novels and a novella, but there have been no worthy, state-of-the-nation tomes ...”

“... Because a love story needs a star-crossed pair, most of them start with a meeting. Joshua Spassky, Gwendoline Riley’s third novel and, however shooshed up it is, a love story, doesn’t start with the meeting described above, which comes only thirty pages before the novel’s end. And of their first meeting we are not told much more than that Joshua had ...”