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Gee Williams

Desire Line

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A freak tidal surge hitting a Welsh seaside town leaves devastation and three locals drowned. Yet when a fourth body is found in the debris it takes time for it to be identified as the respected Oxford writer Sara Meredith. A celebrity, an icon to an entire generation – what was she doing in such an unlikely place? And how had it ended in her death?

 
These mysteries overwhelm the lives of people Sara has left behind: estranged husband Josh, their volatile teenage daughter Eurwen and someone else – a stranger. Is this stranger now the only person who can reconstruct Sara’s last few weeks, frame-by-frame?
 

'Gee Williams' prose style calls to mind a somewhat unlikely hybrid between James Joyce and Martin Amis. First person, unreliable, not-quite-murder-mystery [...] And in Williams' hands, Rhyl, the book's setting becomes a noir-ish, too-bright-early-technicolour otherworld [...] much like fellow Welsh author Jo Mazelis' recent work SignificanceDesire Line is a work of great philosophical depth and profundity masquerading as a murder mystery. And like that book it leaves you both disorientated and yet somehow awoken. A must read.' - John Lavin, The Welsh Agenda

 

'Mapping a complex sequence of events, alongside an exploration of the effects of trauma and loss, embodied by the tidal surge which strikes the North Wales’ coastal town, Desire Line is a thought-provoking observation of human behaviour that will draw readers in to its mysterious, and often dark, world.' - Emma Schofield, Wales Arts Review

 

'Williams writing is stylish, her descriptions mesmeric.' - Rachel Trezise

 

'It is a work that understands ourselves and is so eloquently written it would be a wave of disappointment should you forego the wonderful experience it brings.'

Maddy McGlynn, New Welsh Review

About Gee:

Gee Williams was born and brought up in North Wales and now lives in Cheshire with her husband. A widely-published poet and a dramatist as well as writer of fiction, her work has appeared in disparate places: fromThe Sunday Times to The Pan Book of Horror. Many of her scripts have been broadcast by BBC Radio 4. She has won both The Rhys Davies and The Book Pl@ce Contemporary Short Story Awards, was Poetry Review’s New Poet, Summer ‘97, short-listed for The Geoffrey Dearmer Award and (with Sol B. River) short-listed for the Race in the Media Radio Drama Award 2001. Pure Gold Fiction Award 2008. Short-listed for the James Tait Black Memorial Fiction Prize 2008. Short-listed for Wales Book of the Year 2009 and 2013.