INCLUDED IN THE GRANTA SHORTS LIST: Gwendoline Riley's critically-acclaimed breakout novel is a blackly comic portrait of familial and marital dysfunction.

'A singular, devastating journey into the ungovernable reaches of the heart' Observer SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017 Neve is a writer in her mid-30s married to an older man, Edwyn. For now they are in a place of relative peace, but their past battles have left scars. As Neve recalls the decisions that led her to this marriage, she tells of other loves and other debts, from her bullying father and her self-involved mother to a musician who played her and a series of lonely flights from place to place. Drawing the reader into the battleground of her relationship, Neve spins a story of helplessness and hostility, an ongoing conflict in which both husband and wife have played a part. But is this, nonetheless, also a story of love?

"Eviscerating, elegant, explosive... First Love resonates a power that is bittersweet and highly affecting" - Financial Times

"Exquisite... searing... we are also left with the stinging sense of having been loved..." - Daily Telegraph

"Compelling from the beginning. In precise, economic prose Riley conveys a sense of Edwyn and Neve's intimate relationship... An engrossing novel and Riley's writing shines through" - Evening Standard

"Gwendoline Riley [is] a fascinating novelist... She takes a familiar theme of midlife minor angst and focuses in, closer and closer, until the banal becomes surreal, even beautiful. The effect is beguiling... First Love is an exquisite and combative piece of news from nowhere - which is everywhere, too" - Guardian

"Riley's descriptive powers [are] masterful... First Love is suffused with gems... Original and unforgettable" - Mail on Sunday

"Exceptionally good... an impossible little wonder of a book, terrifying and horrible... Take up the gauntlet with Gwendoline Riley: it's worth it" - TLS

"Devastating and stylish" - Observer

"An intimate, uncompromising anatomy of love and revulsion between husband and wife, child and parents, from a writer of singular vision" - Guardian

"Visceral... almost impossible to turn away from" - New Statesman

"Riley's First Love maps the ins and outs of human emotion. It will dazzle you" - Stylist

"Makes you question what love is... [Riley] should be on every literary lover's bookshelf" - Monocle Radio

"Riley writes in pared-back, deceptively light sentences that twist and turn the emotional landscape almost imperceptibly. Dialogue, too, is witheringly precise, often funny. First Love says something very honest about relationships" - Sunday Times

"Riley brings you up short with almost every spiky sentence in this stealthy, penetrating novel that recasts love as a dark, terrific puzzle, perhaps never to be solved" - Daily Mail

"A modern-day Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" - Tatler

"This is, in a truly wonderful way, a perfectly horrible little novel... It is exact and exacting, [told] in pristine prose... Without giving away the ending, there is no simple ending... It is a plagal cadence, a wistful, imperfect resolution, a kind of blessing in its own way" - Scotland on Sunday

"[With] rich character depictions [...] Riley teases out a series of painful but exquisitely comedic episodes" - Spectator

"Expect to read a forensic discussion of the ordinariness of life rendered bittersweet" - Vogue

"A book of extraordinary potency that does full justice to the appalling tangles into which the heart can lead us" - Lady

"[Filled] with moments of humour and tenderness" - Radio Times

"A brutal book and it will stay with you long after the hundred and sixty pages are over, but Riley manages to inject it with a thin vein of black humour" - Bookmunch

"A book which unflinchingly explores toxic relationships... A beguiling novel" - National

"A short but devastating sucker punch of a book" - Shiny New Books

"An incisive and often chilling portrait of the narrator's mother: one of the great comic monsters of recent fiction" - Spectator

"Outstanding... shot through with moments of almost sinister tenderness" - Daily Telegraph

"This exquisite, disquieting novella is a minute portrait of a marriage that disintegrates into a horror in such gradual steps that each feels like a sting" - Daily Telegraph

"Riley's prose is so electric, so alive with humour and insight and passion, that by the end you will want to stand up and cheer" - Observer

"Riley is a writer who cuts right to the heart of things... raw, fierce and true" - Observer