Chapters (21)
‘Attuned to the nuances of social interaction that lie above the threshold of awareness and elude articulation, Lowdon observes interpersonal relationships with a satirist’s sharp eye. Her narrator pierces façades and parses hybrid, often contradictory, cocktails of emotion with an efficiency reminiscent of Alan Hollinghurst’s early novels … Peeling the layers of her characters’ drives and desires demands a precision that, as the subtlety of these observations attests, Lowdon possesses’ Lindsay Gail Gibson, Times Literary Supplement
‘A startlingly assured debut, chronicling the lives of twentysomethings in contemporary London. (I read it in the same fevered excitement as I read Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children.) It’s a social commentary, a page-turner and it’s packed with beautiful sentences’ Sunday Business Post
‘All the way through what is essentially a realist novel about young Londoners runs an edge of tension, of suppressed panic. You await the explosion, never quite knowing what form it will take … Minor events all seem to take place in the shadow of the loaded gun we know must be about to go off, in “those vacuum-packed, suspended seconds” before the obscure but inevitable bang … The characters’ moral wranglings and the machinery of the plot spiral inexorably inwards, into the bedroom. It’s there that everything will eventually go bang’ Lidija Haas, Guardian
‘Lowdon has Evelyn Waugh’s willingness to inflict gruesome plot twists on her Bright Young Things’ Literary Review
‘A fresh and sharp-minded writer’ Blake Morrison, Observer
‘Razor-sharp satire of millennial Londoners and their pretentions in this promising debut’ Sunday Times
‘Lowdon deftly maps the tangled love life of failed concert pianist Tamsin Jarvis … She writes with an admirable honesty’ Claire Allfree, Metro
‘Deftly plotted and evocatively written. Left of the Bang’s characters are believable and their interactions ironically, wince-inducingly familiar’ Sasha Garwood, Marylebone Journal
Dedication
For my grandmothers, D.E.M. and G.M.M.L.
Epigraph
Left of the bang: a military term for the build-up to an explosion. On a left–right time line, preparation and prevention are left of the bang; right of the bang refers to the aftermath.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for Left of the Bang
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Thank You
About the Author
About the Publisher
One
Her father’s arms around her. His voice vibrating through his chest and into hers.
‘I’m here, tinker. I’m here.’
Her bleeding toenail, open like a birthday card.
Two
When Tamsin Jarvis was twelve, she saw her father kissing another woman.