Paisley Girl: A Novel

By Fran Gordon

Book Overview

Dazzling in its language, exquisitely moving and desperately funny, Fran Gordon's Paisley Girl is a work of rare power. From the novel's first line - "Word has spread of my body" - we are thrust into the mind of a young unnamed woman whose skin is spiraled by mast-cell leukemia. Brilliant, panicked, obsessed, and richly human, she tumbles into a journey of discovery that carries her from backstage parties to hospitals, and from London flats to the shores of Barbados. Less a novel of disease than a tracing of the path from body to soul, Paisley Girl is a bold and unforgettable debut.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312263716
• ISBN13: 9780312263713
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.6" x 6.4"

Customer Reviews

The Abstract Figure...

A young groupie in the eighties develops a rare blood disease which seemingly makes her allergic to her own skin. After going through the trauma of hospitalization, she takes off for the Caribbean for some carpe diem. Paisley Girl is about her funny, sad, and lyrical journey, and the people she encounters. Despite the subject-matter, Gordon never devolves into sentimentality or tearfulness. If anything, Paisley Girl is an uplifting novel about a young girl's desire to say "yes" to life despite all odds.

Stunning

I was lucky enough to have heard the author read from this novel when it was still a work in progress. The prose was as stunning then as it is now on the printed page.

A weird and startling journey

This book violently grabs your attention and forces you into a foreign, yet strangely familiar world. You are fascinated and repelled at the same time that you yourself become more developed and glamorous. A curious book which I highly recommend to anyone who knows risks always pay off.

A short, sharp, thrilling debut

Fran Gordon's novel is simply one of the most arresting pieces of first fiction I have ever encountered. The author's command of the language is wide and wild; her narrator's voice is blessed with a graceful, playful mental acuity that reaffirms the primacy of the mind and soul even in the face of her body's faithless dissolution. Funny, impassioned, very much alive, PAISLEY GIRL is a book that will revive your faith in the power of written language to map the jagged geography of the human heart.