Joanna Biggs writes:

Because a love story needs a star-crossed pair, most of them start with a meeting. Joshua Spassky, Gwendoline Riley's third novel and, however shooshed up it is, a love story, doesn’t start with the meeting described above, which comes only thirty pages before the novel's end. And of their first meeting we are not told much more than that Joshua had been ominously introduced by a friend as 'the man himself'. Riley is interested in a lot of things – looking closely, remembering, restraint – but is most interested in telling an old story in a new way. She tries out several ways of doing this in Joshua Spassky; withholding, dramatising and then unravelling her lovers' meeting is the first of them.

(LRB 16 August 2007)

Cape | hardback 164 pp. |ISBN: 9780224076999