Geoff Nicholson

Female Ruins isn't Geoff Nicholson being humorous, this is a straightforward novel in many ways about a young woman trying to understand her relationship with her father. Kelly, the young woman lives in rural Suffolk and drives a taxi. She works hard and seems to have a fairly dull life and a rocky relationship with her mum. Dexter, from the US, comes into her life and things get more complicated. Interspersed with this narrative are occasional chapters that are written as if they are articles by her father, a cult architecture writer who famously never built anything. Rather than breaking up the story, these articles add to it, either obtusely by referring to a type of building Kelly has been showing to Dexter or directly. I enjoyed the novel, although I found the ending somewhat unsatisfactory and I was unsure what the writer was trying to say at that point.… (mais)