A.L. Kennedy
A.L. Kennedy was born in Dundee. and now divides her time between Scotland and the East Midlands. She has won a variety of UK and international book awards, including a Lannan Award, the Costa Prize, the Heinrich Heine Preis, the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rees Prize. She has twice been included on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list. She has written ten novels, one of which was longlisted for the Booker Prize, six short story collections, three books of non-fiction and three books for children. She also performs occasionally in one-person shows and as a stand-up comic.
Alive in the Merciful Country
by A.L. Kennedy
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Buy Alive in the Merciful Country
From a Costa Book of the Year winner, Booker nominee and double Granta-selected Best Young British novelist comes a searing portrayal of trauma, police abuse and the power of hope.
Teaching nine-year-olds on Zoom. A relationship interrupted by enforced distance. A teenaged son who cannot leave the house. Anna McCormick is already struggling to cope with the unwanted twists 2020 has served up. But when an unstamped envelope arrives overnight, her past begins to cast its own long shadow on the present.
With an uncaring government compounding her woes and a hostile threat drawing closer, Anna must dig deep to keep hope alive for herself and those around her.
This is a twisty, heart-racing page-turner and viscerally rendered portrayal of abuse of power by the state, by the police and by the villains much closer to home.
REVIEWS OF Alive in the Merciful Country
'Kennedy is a superb writer and the canniness of her observation keeps you reading' Sunday Times
'It seems everything [Kennedy] touches turns to art … she continues to impress with her psychological fearlessness and breathtaking affection for language.' New York Times
'Kennedy is a force of nature.' New York Times
