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How to Be Somebody Else

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How to Be Somebody Else

By: Miranda Pountney
Narrated by: Florence Howard
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Exquisitely written, sublimely fraught and erotically charged, How to Be Somebody Else is an uncoming of age in New York City

Spring 2015, New York.

On the surface Dylan has achieved the impossible - a life in New York, eight years of making this stick. And yet it is not the thing she'd imagined (what had she imagined?). When she walks out of her career, then apartment, and into a housesit for an artist she's never met, she does not tell her friends, her parents back in England, or Matt, her boyfriend, living on the West Coast.

Job-free, rent-free, she'll make good on her book, herself, other things too, she's thinking, when her neighbour Kate shows up and invites her to a party. There she meets Gabe, who happens to be married to Kate but insists, 'it's not a thing'. The affair that follows consumes her and she begins to consider what is fixed and what is variable. Can a person be both? Is Gabe the thing he seems? Is she?

As spring turns to summer, her experiments in living test loyalties and boundaries until an unexpected encounter between the two couples forces her to confront her future.

©2024 Miranda Pountney (P)2024 Penguin Audio

 City Life Coming of Age Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Urban New York Romance

Critic Reviews

A stunning novel. Remarkable and real. Every single line is supercharged with a kind of cerebral eroticism, a zinging inventive intelligence. The sentences buzz and hum (Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital)
Sharp and entertaining
Impressive… A book founded on the anxiety that undermines our drive towards attachment and stability, and it thrives on a constant sense of slippage and precarity, a jumpy exploration of what it might feel like to cede control, and what might take its place
Pountney has an admirable clarity of voice and her book is consistently impressive… Intelligent, confident and original
How to Be Somebody Else has literary oomph... What sets this debut apart is the way it sustains its sparky style to the last page without stinting on the serious stuff
Brutal and brilliant, in luscious prose, How to Be Somebody Else shows us what happens when life starts to unfurl (Annie Lord, author of Notes on Heartbreak)
Unsettling and original (Tessa Hadley, author of After the Funeral)
So sharp and well observed. I loved the wry, understated humour, and how perceptive the book is about female desire. In its exploration of a woman trying to make sense of herself it is moving without being sentimental, and clever without seeming to try too hard (Rebecca Wait, author of I'm Sorry You Feel That Way)
Compulsive. It makes its moves with such assurance that it’s hard to believe this is Pountney’s first novel. A wild mess of sex and feeling is here given beautiful form (Adam Thirlwell, author of The Future Future)
A novel of graceful sentences and perfectly-lit vignettes, often obliquely funny; the minutiae and questionable decisions of a newly reimagined life, observed at just the right distance for us to see the whole and the details at once (Holly Gramazio, author of The Husbands)
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