Electricity

Ray Robinson

18 December 2014
9781447274940
336 pages

Synopsis

Electricity is now a film starring Agyness Deyn.

Lily's epilepsy means she's used to seeing the world in terms of angles - you look at every surface, you weigh up every corner, and you think of your head slamming into it - but what would she be like without her sharp edges?

Prickly, spiky, up-front honest and down-to-earth practical, Lily is thirty, and life's not easy but she gets by. Needing no-one and asking for nothing, it's just her and her epilepsy: her constant companion.

But then Lily's long-estranged mother dies, and Lily is drawn back into a world she thought she'd left behind. Forced to renegotiate the boundaries of her life, she realises she has a lot to learn - about relationships, about the past, and about herself - and some difficult decisions ahead of her.

Ray Robinson's Electricity is a thorny, uncompromising novel, with attitude. It is also -- thanks to Lily O'Connor, its sharp-edged, hard-living, tough-talking narrator -- mesmerising, uplifting and unexpectedly tender
An energetic debut, bristling with talent . . . It's black, savage, funny and rather uncomfortably haunting
An eviscerating debut novel . . . Its fast, furious plot, kaleidoscopic imagery, blunt observations and a wry, ingenuous, hugely compassionate heroine make Electricity a breathtaking assault on the senses