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Veronica

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Veronica

By: Mary Gaitskill
Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
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About this listen

 As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica: an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal "office kit" and a plaque that reads "Still Anal After All These Years".

Improbably, the two women become friends. Their friendship will survive not only Alison's reentry into the seductive nocturnal realm of fashion, but also Veronica's terrible descent into the then-uncharted realm of AIDS. The memory of their friendship will continue to haunt Alison years later, when she, too, is aging and ill and is questioning the meaning of what she experienced and who she became during that time.

Masterfully layering time and space, thought and sensation, Mary Gaitskill dazzles the listener with psychological insight and a mystical sense of the soul's hurtling passage through the world. A novel unlike any other, Veronica is a tour de force about the fragility and mystery of human relationships, the failure of love, and love's abiding power.

©2005 Mary Gaitskill (P)2006 Random House, Inc. Contemporary Fiction Genre Fiction Friendship

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Critic reviews

  • National Book Award Finalist, Fiction, 2005
  • National Book Critics Circle Finalist, Fiction, 2005

"Elegiac, funny, and life affirming." (Booklist)
"Gaitskill's implacable refusal of sentimentality is her great strength: no group hugs here, just baleful understanding." (The Washington Post)
"Gaitskill is enormously gifted....Her palpable talent puts her among the most eloquent and perceptive contemporary fiction writers." (The New York Times Books Review)
"Gaitskill delivers her most affecting, sophistocated work to date." (The Boston Globe)
"A novel that will leave you shaking, and joyful simultaneously." (O, The Oprah Magazine)
All stars
Most relevant
Traps of pain and perceived pleasures for women ungrounded, self loathing and love reflected, refracted.
A finely written, wandering book.

Decentred bodies

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Gimlet eyed and emotive without being sentimental, Gaitskill is up there with the very best. Recording and narration were excellent - highly recommended

An astonishing novel - genuine masterpiece

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