The Wrecking Ball: A Novel - Softcover

Spens, Christiana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061649341 ISBN 13: 9780061649349

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2008

Synopsis

Armed with trust funds and pedigrees but bent on rebellion, twenty-somethings Alice, Harry, Rose, and Hugo are teetering on the brink of self-destruction. With Manhattan and London as their playgrounds, they chase oblivion—and their next high—through a glittering blur of nightclubs, decadent parties, high fashion, and underground music scenes, hard-partying on the razor's edge with a never-ending cocktail of drugs and booze. Insomniacs and unstoppable, these four lost souls ride the extreme highs and devastating lows of a summer that quickly reaches a crescendo of music, heat, and hedonism. Wavering between moments of revelation and ruin, they illuminate a generation given everything—except an answer to the timeless question: Who am I?

From a remarkable new literary voice comes a startling, fresh, strikingly candid novel of addiction and excess.

About this title

About the Author:

Christiana Spens is a student at the University of Cambridge. She has been writing art and fashion pieces for Studio International since she was fifteen years old, and continues to write for Rockfeedback. The Wrecking Ball is her first novel.

From Publishers Weekly:

Spens's protagonist, Alice, just a few years older than the debut novelist herself, is the product of a transcontinental teenagehood, a British-born child of exceptionally wealthy, divorced parents with a tony Connecticut boarding school education—including intensives in psychedelics, cocaine and the old vodka-in-an-Evian-bottle trick. After graduation, Alice hangs around London dabbling in fashion and the attention of men—first Hugo, a man twice her age, and then Harry, a depressed would-be songwriter with a pedigree similar to her own. Ostensibly the story of Alice's unrequited love for Harry, Spens's novel also forward marches through fashion shows and fetes, cigarettes and pills, stargazing and navel-gazing. The narrative flits back and forth in time and alternates hazy points of view among Alice, Harry and Alice's pill-happy best friend, Rose. The big field party that brings all three stories together, the Wrecking Ball, gives them a suitably soft spot to land, but the confessional narrative collapses in amoral inanity before then, ending up in a discomfiting netherworld between Gossip Girl and A Million Little Pieces. (Oct.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0061649341
• ISBN 13: 9780061649349
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256