Rosie’s #Bookreview Team #RBRT Relationships book The Men by @fannycalder

Today’s team review is from Georgia, she blogs here https://www.georgiarosebooks.com

Georgia has been reading The Men by Fanny Calder

I chose to read The Men as a member of Rosie Amber’s Book Review Team and received a copy from the publisher. That has not altered my opinion of this book or my review in any way.

The minute I opened The Men I knew I was onto a winner. This is not a story, there is no beginning, middle and ending, although technically, of course, there is. It’s more a series of relationship studies and it is compellingly written.

I imagine the narrator to be an exotic creature, impossibly glamorous and self-aware in a way I have never managed to be. This book is intelligently written with such an eye for the minutiae of the many relationships the narrator experiences that for someone who has had a more limited knowledge of the opposite sex it was incredibly interesting. 

The writing though, that was the clincher for me, I loved it. Spare, honest and extraordinarily good. There were so many beautiful lines and phrases I couldn’t wait to get back to reading it each night. Thank you Ms Calder, it has been a joy.

A darkly brilliant debut novel by Fanny Calder, and arguably essential reading for the feminist hedonist woman in your life. City life in the 1990s. Anonymous, intense, paradoxical and sometimes lonely. A young, haunted woman falls in love with a singer. She finds she has been consumed by the relationship and when it ends – as it inevitably does – she feels unable to quite rediscover herself. Cities can draw you into even darker places, and she embarks on a series of intense relationships with thirteen men of very different types, from a rough sleeper to a millionaire, and from a transvestite to a leading politician. As she is propelled through a series of extraordinary adventures and wild parties she finds she begins to lose her own identity. Is there a way out? A raw and unflinchingly honest narrative with stripped down language that is liberating and sometimes challenging. It is a tale of urban human connections crafted with no judgement or deep introspection – a window on the author’s own life at that time that will resonate and stay with you.

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