Moral Hazard - Softcover

Kate Jennings

3.64

321 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841157384 ISBN 13: 9781841157382

Publisher: Harpercollins Pub Ltd, 2003

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The acclaimed second novel from Kate Jennings, author of Snake.On Wall Street, reflects Cath, women are about as welcome as fleas in a sleeping bag. She finds herself working there because she needs serious money: after ten good years, her beloved older husband Bailey is gravely ill. So begins her journey into two nightmare worlds.Powerful, and darkly, disconcertingly comic. Margaret Walters, Sunday TimesBlackly funny, coruscatingly clear-eyed and intelligent, Kate Jennings second novel doesnt waste a word. Maureen Duffy, author of RestitutionA unique book by an extraordinary writer: The great city illuminated from within. Shirley Hazzard, author of The Transit of VenusA small pearl of a novelas gripping as any thriller. Newsday

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Review:

Kate Jennings's first novel, Snake, was praised for combining "dry comedy" and "genuine heartbreak"; now she has used the same sweet-and-sour recipe in her second book, Moral Hazard--but with even more raw ingredients. The heroine is thirtysomething Cath, a smiling, punning, do-gooding bien pensant who has somehow ended up in the vicious purlieus of Wall Street, dealing billions with the great white sharks of high finance. This unfeasibly high-powered employ contrasts sharply with Cath's home life. She's married to a man 25 years her senior: "sweet Bailey, dearest Bailey... optimistic where I was pessimistic, enthusiastic where I was distrustful." This marriage is not perfect: as Cath mordantly observes, "marriage is awful in its nearness. Yoked together, bound, in a three-legged race with no finishing line." Nevertheless Cath and Bailey, in their May/December way, have found a kind of happiness. Then, horribly, Bailey is diagnosed with Alzheimer's....

Three chapters in we learn this terrible truth, and the rest of the book concerns Cath's desperate, affecting, sardonic, resolute ways and means of dealing with Bailey's rollercoaster ride to the inevitable--or even worse. It's not an easy journey; this is not the easiest of books. What largely rescues the whole from being a whiny or self-pitying lament is the prose: humorous, energetic, sharp, urbane, and vivid. --Sean Thomas, Amazon.co.uk

About the Author:

Kate Jennings, who grew up in Australia, has lived since 1979 in New York, where she has worked as a freelance writer and senior speech writer at an investment bank. Her writings have appeared in New York Times Book Review and her first novel, Snake, received wide and enthusiastic review coverage, almost making the Booker short list.

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