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You

A Novel

By Joanna Briscoe

August 2011
$15.00
368 pp
5.5 x 8.25 in
Paperback

ISBN-13: 9781608194834
ISBN-10: 1608194833

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You

A Novel

By Joanna Briscoe

From the author of Sleep with Me, a lush, intergenerational story of improbable love and inescapable choices on the romantic moors of England.

Dora Bannan hopes for a new life when she moves her husband and their three children to the wild moorland. She finds a job teaching music at a progressive school, where she also enrolls the children- their fellow students the progeny of back-to-the-land bohemians. But when the school's elegant art teacher, Elisabeth Dahl, offers Dora a seductive alternative to her domestic routine, Dora finds that real change is far from easy. Meanwhile, her precocious only daughter, Cecilia, longs for a more traditional life, especially the formal education her new school can't offer. Cecilia becomes obsessed with her English teacher, James Dahl-an errant representative of the establishment she craves, and husband of the dangerous Elisabeth.

Twenty years later, the adult Cecilia brings her partner and daughters back home to the moors and her aging mother. Moving between past and present, You slowly reveals how far Dora and Cecilia once let their private, impossible desires lead them-and how much further the consequences extend. Sensual, unnerving, and gripping, You is a novel about the lives we think we want, the choices we can't unmake, and the loves and losses we never forget.

Praise for Sleep with Me:

"The book is a pas de deux of information revealed and concealed … Briscoe is a controlled and elegant writer."-Washington Post

"Eerie and erotic … this Black Widow spider's web of a book casts an unshakeable spell with its plot lines of obsession, infidelity and menace."-Seattle Post-Intelligencer


Reviews for You:

“You is deliciously reminiscent of the haunting tales of the Brontes, Blackmoore and Hardy.”—Baltimore Sun

“Briscoe depicts this world of few rules and many consequences with honesty and with compassion. In lucid, observant prose, she captures the messiness of family and, crushingly, the consequences of desire.”—Publishers Weekly

“British author Briscoe’s second novel (after Sleep with Me, 2005) tracks the obsessions of a mother and daughter who fall under the sway of a married couple of teachers at a progressive school in the 1970s. Dora Bannon despairs of her squalid lifestyle at Wind Tor, a dilapidated house on the moors in Dartmoor, with her artisan husband, their four children, and the motley assortment of vagabonds renting rooms on the fly. When she is drawn to elegant art teacher Elisabeth Dahl, she is appalled and excited by the attraction to another woman. Meanwhile, her 17-year-old daughter, Cecilia, develops an overwhelming infatuation with English teacher James Dahl, whose academic rigor is a welcome antidote to the chaos that rules her family. Twenty years later, Cecilia returns to her childhood home to take care of her ill mother, and both women reckon with the high price they ultimately paid for love. Briscoe painstakingly details every emotional shift and turn as she summons the romance of the moors and offers a devastating depiction of the “carefree” ’70s.”—Booklist, prepub