Strings Attached
A Novel By Gay Walley
Book 1 of the Venus as She Ages Collection
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PRODUCT DETAILS
Publishing Date: October 5, 2021
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-955314-01-5 238 pages, Price: $16.75
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-955314-02-2, 238 pages, Price: $9.99
Publisher: IML Publications LLC
Language: English
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ABOUT THE BOOK
In her first novel, Gay Walley weaves two stories into a seamless narrative - a woman's quest for love, and the drunken, vagabond childhood she endured with her father.
Raised on a barstool, Charlee spends her youth drinking in the dark dives of New England and Montreal with a father who flees from woman to woman. As an adult, in one of her father's haunts, she encounters the man whose flaws and attractions will make her face every emotion that confounded her dad. She longs for companionship, but from her father she has learned to trust only her own will and crave solitude. Can she overcome a life of defiant independence and her distrust of affection
Walley's daring prose style allows the writer to make Charlee's rough but endearing past immediate and vital in her present.
"I often think the truth," Charlee supposes, "was that my father lost me in a card game. He was losing; indeed, he lost everything. The men are all sitting around the bar, and this card game is a secret, all-consuming vice of my father's. He will do anything to keep in the game. And he says, 'Okay, I've got nothing except my daughter. When she's eighteen, you can have her. You can take her and do whatever the hell you like.'"
Populated with tough, brilliant characters who crisscross New England, Strings Attached is a novel about the search for love, about the possibilities and impossibilities of that quest. Walley says, "These searching characters fall away and toward each other, as we do in every love affair, and come to their ultimate truths."
RAVES & REVIEWS
"The author's memorable style and strong character development weave a heartfelt story that will be remembered by all readers." –Library Journal
"Walley knows her territory. She knows alcoholics; she knows how difficult it is to love, and endure love, after a broken childhood. In the end what stays with the reader is the loyalty of the damaged child to the equally damaged parent." – Margaret Diehl, The New York Times Book Review
"An intelligent and uncommonly sensitive first novel describing a young woman's slow and painful coming of age... a quiet and unassuming debut all the more moving for its modesty." –Kirkus
"An engaging and persuasive novel, a difficult life shaped into a configuration of wisdom and grace. Gay Walley is a writer of uncommon perception and extraordinary poise. Her gift for maintaining perfect balance between delicacy and depth will take the reader's breath away." – Susan Dodd Author of The Mourner's Bench and O Careless Love: Stories and a Novella
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Based in New York City, Gay Walley, frequently writes about artistic, free-spirited women, whom in each novel face existential issues. Her novels are risky, literary, pushing boundaries in form, style, and the exploration of the female psyche. STRINGS ATTACHED is the first novel in a collection called VENUS AS SHE AGES which, in six novels, takes a female through different situations that challenge and test her commitment to truth, beauty, love and freedom. British born, Montreal raised, New York City honed, JACQUELINE GAY WALLEY, under the pen name Gay Walley, has published four novels, Strings Attached, The Erotic Fire of the Unattainable: Aphorisms on Art, Love, and the Vicissitudes of Life (finalist for Paris Book Award), Lost in Montreal, and Duet. Her award-winning play, Love, Genius and a Walk opened in New York City in 2013 and will open in London Fall of 2021. Her film, Erotic Fire of the Unattainable: Longing to be Found has been selected and shown in the 2020 virtual Brooklyn Film Festival, Sarasota Film Festival, Cinequest Film Festival and will show in American Fringe Festival in Paris in November 2021. She teaches writing privately in New York, as well as edits and ghostwrites.
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