Latest news with #EmmaJaneUnsworth
Daily Mail
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
'A smash hit': The best Contemporary novels out now - Under a Riviera Moon by Helen McGinn, Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth, Favourite Daughter by Morgan Dick
Under a Riviera Moon by Helen McGinn (Boldwood £9.99, 272pp) This deliciously romantic story set in Paris and Cannes is perfect to curl up with on a sunny afternoon. After years of infertility which ended her marriage, Maggie is distraught to discover that not only is her ex engaged but his fiancee is pregnant. Heartbroken, Maggie takes up her mother's offer of a trip to the South of France to pick up some of her grandmother Elizabeth's things from her best friend, Allegra. American and impossibly glamorous, Allegra talks Maggie through the photos in the box Elizabeth left for her before she fled Paris in 1961. Maggie and Allegra's connection in the present day is contrasted with Allegra and Elizabeth's whirlwind year in the City of Love. It romps along and is brilliant on grabbing opportunities when they appear. Wonderful. Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth (The Borough Press £16.99, 288pp) Former party girl Sarah is in her early 40s, flirting with sobriety, single and bored. Her sister Juliette, a wife and mother, is approaching her 40th birthday, so to celebrate the pair set off on a road trip around Scotland. The narrative alternates between their teenage years and now, exploring what happened to Sarah then and how those events have shaped her present emotional landscape. However, as the trip progresses, Sarah discovers that Juliette's life isn't as glossy as it looks on the outside either. The more demons they exorcise, the better Sarah begins to feel. It's beautifully written and terrific on sisterhood, sex and obsessions. Favourite Daughter by Morgan Dick (Viking £16.99, 352pp) Another story about sisters, this one is hilarious, heart-breaking and utterly original. Mickey and Arlo are half-sisters who share a recently deceased father but have never met. Mickey blames her dad for every ounce of sorrow she has ever experienced; Arlo, who grew up with him and was his carer before his death, couldn't adore him more. Grief-stricken Arlo is horrified to discover her father cut her out of his will before he died. Mickey can't believe it when she's told that his considerable estate is passing to her – on the condition that she attends seven therapy sessions. Arlo is a therapist – guess where Mickey ends up? Fantastic. I think it might be a smash hit.
The Guardian
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth review
On the first morning of their holiday together in a remote part of Scotland, 42-year-old Sarah convinces her younger sister, Juliette, to clamber on to the roof of their mobile home for a better phone signal. Juliette has three layers of tinfoil wrapped around her limbs and a tinfoil cone hat plonked on her head before she clocks that she's fallen for a prank. It's a pleasing bit of sibling slapstick in Slags, the new novel from Emma Jane Unsworth about desire, dissatisfaction and the ferocious loyalty of sisters. And sisterhood, as Unsworth writes it here, is an unbreakable connection for which no prank antenna is needed. When Sarah takes Juliette on a Highland road trip for her birthday they find themselves revealing secrets and reckoning with their younger selves. Candid and comic, Slags is Thelma & Louise with a campervan and without a clifftop. There are shades of Fleabag, too, in the fractious sisters, the sexual escapades of one countered by the suburban righteousness of the other. The novel focuses on Sarah, with chapters alternating between her teenage self, obsessing over a teacher in a desperately pining first-person confessional, and the adult woman, who puzzles over the percolations of midlife desire (narrated by an older, omniscient authorial voice). The present-day Sarah is single, sardonic, bored with sobriety. She lives in London, where no one seems to party any more and 'everyone was thinking about their gut health, or their crochet, or the state of the economy'. Juliette, by contrast, is married with children, and lives in Manchester. Her husband, Johnnie, is into ice plunges and Andrew Huberman podcasts. Unsworth is especially merciless in her portrait of a particular kind of modern masculinity, captured here in all its absurdity. 'Longevity seemed pointless,' Sarah reflects, 'when you were as tedious as Johnnie.' Johnnie doesn't have much of a role in the novel, but it's often through the minor characters, those merely glanced at in the rear-view mirror, that Unsworth demonstrates the sharpness of her perceptions. Deanna, Sarah and Juliette's mother, for instance, only periodically swings into view. She is a fleeting memory of neglect – abandoning her young daughters on a broken-down train, stumbling into a party humiliatingly drunk – but Unsworth allows her to cast a long shadow. Later, Sarah reflects more forgivingly on her mother's abortive efforts to escape suburban life and 'the stocks of domesticity'. Suburbia, in general, is efficiently demolished here, reduced to 'bin wars, magnolia tree one-upmanship, brick drives, chest freezers, double garages, weedkiller, Chicken Tonight in Le Creuset, Laura Ashley in perpetuity.' Sarah wants none of it, but her job and her life in the city also leave her empty. Unsworth describes how 'late at night, after video calls with the East Coast of America, she often stayed on as a host, alone, in those abandoned Zoom rooms, her own face staring back at her, the glow of the ring-light as hygge as any wood-burning stove, sipping a glass of something moderately alcoholic, feeling a dystopian peace …' It's not quite loneliness, more a beautiful desolation. 'I don't want to sort my life out,' she tells Juliette during a heated drunken argument. When Juliette protests 'But you feel bad', she replies: 'Only sometimes …' One of Sarah's distinguishing qualities is this lack of clarity about what it is that she desires. She belongs, as she explains, to gen X, that 'lost generation', too young to be old, too old to be millennial, sexually liberated and yet still searching for something. Where Unsworth captured the erratic hedonism of twentysomethings in her 2014 novel Animals and the online dysfunctions of thirtysomethings in 2020's Adults, here she plumbs the muddles of midlife. Sarah is a rare female character: she's not a mother, but neither is she full of fraught questions about fertility or menopause. She is, instead, frank about 'getting her rocks off' and the difficulty of how to do that without the aid of drink or drugs. How to contend with sexual desire is a question for the 15-year-old Sarah, too. She shrugs off unhappy sexual encounters, including an experience of indecent exposure, with a swaggering bravado. How that shapes the adult Sarah's attitude to sex is not straightforward, and there's an intelligence in Unsworth's refusal to present clear cause and effect. Comedy, rather than tragedy, is the response she most often prefers. Perhaps this is symptomatic of the Fleabagification of women's stories – where farce somehow feels more truthful than straight-up trauma. Is comedy a deflection or a pragmatic approach to getting on with things in a world of misunderstanding and confusion? Certainly, Slags culminates in a confrontation that is more chaotic than climactic. But this is an undeniably fun read, the levity often lifted by an underlying sense of sympathy, affection and tenderness. Unsworth is riotous, rewarding company. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth is published by Borough (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Irish Independent
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Emma Jane Unsworth's fizzy story of sisterly rivalry has shades of her TV collaborator Sharon Horgan
Slags combines the cheery nostalgia of Derry Girls with the rapid-fire humour of Fleabag Sisterly rivalry has long been a rich literary seam to mine, and for good reason. Take two women in the fullness of their chaotic, complex glory, add in a dark backstory and the ongoing competition that often happens between women that are close. It's been done before, certainly, but Emma Jane Unsworth has taken this dynamic, swept out the clichés and added plenty of fizz and salt to the trope. It's been five years since Unsworth published her third novel, Adults. It was, among other things, a brilliant and observant portrait of one woman and her social media presence. (A raw, yet highly readable memoir on postnatal depression, After The Storm, was published in 2022). In the years since Adults' came out, she has also turned her attention to screenwriting, co-writing the BBC comedy The Outlaws with Stephen Merchant in 2021. Two years later, she was the showrunner for Dreamland, Sharon Horgan's zippy Sky Atlantic comedy. The latter in particular appears to be a particularly fortuitous collaborator; when it comes to the sharp yet fun tone of their work, the two have much in common.
