My Phantoms

An electric, compelling, often painfully funny portrait of family relationships, which shows the damage we can do in the course of a life.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 'What a phenomenal ear she has, and how remorselessly funny she is - My Phantoms is unmissably good' Kevin Barry, author of Night Boat to Tangier Helen Grant has always been a mystery to her daughter. A twice-divorced mother-of-two she has sought intimacy in all the wrong places. Her daughter Bridget sees her once a year and considers the problem contained. But as she looks back over their fractious relationship, she is forced to confront cruelties inflicted on both sides. My Phantoms is an insightful and painfully funny account of a family strained to breaking point, and a reckoning with the damage we do over the course of a life. My Phantoms was a Book of the Year in the Observer, the Daily Telegraph, the Irish Times, the Guardian, The White Review, the Evening Standard, the Big Issue, the TLS, the Week and the New Statesman.

"What a phenomenal ear she has, and how remorselessly funny she is - My Phantoms is unmissably good" - Night Boat to Tangier

"A writer of singular vision" - Guardian

"Take up the gauntlet with Gwendoline Riley: it's worth it" - TLS

"[Riley] fixes her parents on the page with darkly comic precision, mercilessly attendant to their tics and repetitions... Deliciously uncomfortable" - Guardian

"Riley's novels get under your skin. My Phantoms is unsettling for many reasons - the way it picks at the scab of unconditional love, the way it interrogates questions of inheritance and influence. More than anything, though, it's the fact that it chips away at the compact between reader and narrator... devastating, bleak, unforgettable" - Observer

"Insidiously powerful... There's a lot of sentimental, affirmative fiction about femininity out there at the moment. This jagged little novel stands as a bracing corrective" - Evening Standard

"Riley is a laureate of the stilted, and the dialogue crackles with repetitions, unsaid ellipses, contradictions... There is a great deal of psychological perceptiveness in this slim novel... [My Phantoms sets] itself apart, and is vital, and dashing" - Scotsman

"By some way Riley's best book, a crisply devastating record of a mother-daughter dynamic" - New Statesman

"A masterpiece in compression... My Phantoms leaves us with a precise and bleak-humoured portrait of the phantoms that can haunt a family" - Literary Review

"One for anyone who has struggled with their relationship with their mother. Riley dials up the tension as she skewers familial love" - i Paper

"Gwendoline Riley's unsentimental fiction hovers on the edge of comedy and bleakness... My Phantoms is a distilled psychological tour de force from an exceptional writer" - Spectator

"Riley misses nothing, and her icy evocations of dysfunction and distress are unforgettable" - TLS

"Riley has the ability to draw out the subtle workings and cruelties of relationships and psyches, and wrest them into compact, hard-hitting stories" - FT

"Deeply sad and uncomfortable but savagely funny, too... Riley's prose echoes the repressed trauma that suffuses the novel - spare and elegant" - i Paper

"My Phantoms is completely devastating" - Oldie

"A riveting, merciless little novel" - Sunday Times

"One of those books in which nothing much happens and everything happens... a brilliant brief, acerbic, witty, dark read that I can't recommend heartily enough" - BBC Scotland

"Unsettlingly funny and sharply observant... With notes of Sally Rooney's style in its tightly-written dialogue" - Independent

"My Phantoms effectively captures the ennui of our times... raw ingenuity" - Irish Times

"Unflinching and excruciating, but at times grimly hilarious" - New Statesman

"Riley's seventh novel is a slender, quietly savage riposte to the sentimentality that so often defines depictions of family bonds" - Mail on Sunday

"A novel of squirmy, excruciating humour but also poignancy and pathos... Riley's ear for how people speak, and how to render that in the artifice of the novel, has never been deployed more successfully" - Yorkshire Post

"A brilliant novel... Riley has always been especially skilled at psychological minutiae" - New Left Review

"Short but exceptionally hard-hitting" - Financial Times

"As droll as it is unnerving" - Evening Standard

"Unsettlingly funny and sharply observant" - Sunday Post

"Bleak, tough-minded, reeking with irony" - Private Eye

"A short, sharp shock of a novel [...] funny and devastating" - Guardian

"· A masterpiece of cruel precision and vivid emotional realism about a thwarted mother-daughter relationship [...] A genuinely extraordinary book" - Irish Times

"A slim but brilliant novel - managing to pull off caustic humour and heartbreaking sadness, often within the same line - and it confirms Riley as one of the most talented young writers in the UK today" - Financial Times

"Riley's writing is precise; her ability to pick up on human fallibility merciless... A work of genius" - Big Issue