Tuesday Nights and Wednesday Mornings — Gwendoline Riley

Plucked from the rainy streets of Manchester, award-winning author Gwendoline Riley's novella and stories explore the diminishing prospects of true love, the daunting face of God, and the aftereffects of too much time at the bar with a devotion she likens to “lying on a rest room floor saying the Jesus prayer.” In the titular novella, the centerpiece of the collection, we meet Esther, an emotionally capricious twenty-something, part-time struggling writer, and skeptical romantic. Esther loses herself on the streets of Manchester, her adopted home, and explores it with ritual fervor. Although her best friend Donna provides a steady source of emotional succor, Esther adopts a loner's guise in the face of a broken home and a series of less-than-storybook romances. However, when a young American musician enters her life she comes face-to-face with the intimacy she so desperately seeks. Riley has created a cast of characters that embody both an enigmatic reticence, and a graceful emotionalism. Tuesday Nights and Wednesday Mornings confirms Riley as one of the most talented new voices in fiction today.