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SUZANNAH DUNN
Tenterhooks
BLOOD SUGAR
‘Blood Sugar is lit up by images of rare vitality and beauty.’
MAGGIE GEE
‘Suzannah Dunn is that rarity among contemporary novelists: a genuine stylist. Her prose is like truffles – rich, rare, dark, but never cloying.
WENDY PERRIAM
‘Suzannah Dunn is a writer with a brilliant touch.’
MALCOLM BRADBURY
PAST CARING
‘Poignant and believable… Past Caring is a perceptive novel by a writer who skilfully blends the everyday with the fantastic.’
HELEN DUNMORE
‘Suzannah Dunn writes in loaded and knowing prose, like a hip Edna O’Brien or Muriel Spark.
Glasgow Herald
‘Suzannah Dunn is a gifted writer.’
POLLY TOYNBEE, The Times
QUITE CONTRARY
‘The writing is loaded with vibrant, visual images of so strongly evocative, so poetic a quality that they seem about to burst and to yield up a weight of hidden meaning.’
Literary Review
‘A compelling debut novel from a writer steadily gathering critical plaudits for her penetrative eye and unfussy style… a luminous, honest and haunting portrait of a single woman doing a demanding job and trying to stay alive inside as well.’
Scotland on Sunday
‘A brilliant portrayal of a young woman coming to terms with her past and present.’
Company
VENUS FLARING
‘The prose is precise, images bloom like bruises or blood drops… compact worlds are contained in the simplest of descriptions. Dunn is a surgeon of the heart, and her observations are sparky’.
EITHNE FARRY, Time Out
‘A writer with a subversive wit that few of her peers can match.’
JONATHAN COE
‘Venus Flaring treats familiar themes to a witty and original overhaul. Dunn marries plot and themes, to create a haunting, melancholy tone perfectly suited to the sense of loss which afflicts even minor characters.’
ALISON WOODHOUSE, TLS
‘After reading Venus Flaring no other book will strike quite so close to your soul… Dunn time after time stuns the reader. This is a vital, refreshing, terrifyingly brilliant novel that demands to be read’.
SUSANNA GLASER, Finetime
With love and thanks to my editor,
Charlotte Windsor
CONTENTS
9 Stood Up and Thinking of England
10 Don’t Touch It, Don’t Ignore It, Stay Calm
As we walked down the aisle, he murmured, ‘Spinach …’
I stopped, leaned over and looked down onto the frozen vegetables. During the two days since the delivery of our freezer I had had numerous fantasies, but none about spinach. Sara Lee, yes; spinach, no. And now Christie was beginning with spinach? I dipped down into the fizzy chill to scratch my way to greenery; packs of carrots and sweetcorn hissed as they slipped over one another. Spinach? I called up. ‘Are you sure?’ By comparison, the sweetcorn looked glamorous.
Above me, behind me, he laughed, ‘Never been more sure.’
But I tried, ‘Broccoli florets?’ Because florets sounded faintly enticing.
‘Deceptive.’
I surfaced, enquiringly.
‘Thaws to rubber,’ he explained.
‘How do you know?’
He shrugged, more than necessary, both hands off the moving trolley, Look, Mum, no hands. ‘I just do. Cauliflower, too. Anything that’s not spinach.’ A twitch of a smile. ‘Which is why I said spinach.’ Then he said, ‘I noticed the mound of Mars Bars,’ and managed more of the smile.
Those Mars Bars would have been hard to miss: the only contents, so far, of the freezer. ‘A girl needs her luxuries.’
His eyes dropped wider: he is the only person whom I know who has eyes like trap doors. He said, ‘And I was so sure that it was greens that a girl needed.’
I returned to the matter of the frozen spinach, which, I found, existed in two forms: solid blocks, the size of paperback books; or pellets, packed loosely into cushion-sized bags. A block would be slow to thaw, and then