First Love
Published on 9. April 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
176 pages
978-1-80351-356-0 (ISBN)
Description
'A singular, devastating journey into the ungovernable reaches of the heart' Observer
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017
Neve is a writer in her mid-30s married to an older man, Edwyn. For now they are in a place of relative peace, but their past battles have left scars. As Neve recalls the decisions that led her to this marriage, she tells of other loves and other debts, from her bullying father and her self-involved mother to a musician who played her and a series of lonely flights from place to place.
Drawing the reader into the battleground of her relationship, Neve spins a story of helplessness and hostility, an ongoing conflict in which both husband and wife have played a part. But is this, nonetheless, also a story of love?
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017
Neve is a writer in her mid-30s married to an older man, Edwyn. For now they are in a place of relative peace, but their past battles have left scars. As Neve recalls the decisions that led her to this marriage, she tells of other loves and other debts, from her bullying father and her self-involved mother to a musician who played her and a series of lonely flights from place to place.
Drawing the reader into the battleground of her relationship, Neve spins a story of helplessness and hostility, an ongoing conflict in which both husband and wife have played a part. But is this, nonetheless, also a story of love?
Reviews / Votes
Eviscerating, elegant, explosive... First Love resonates a power that is bittersweet and highly affecting -- Francesca Wade * Financial Times * Exquisite... searing... we are also left with the stinging sense of having been loved... -- Philly Malicka * Daily Telegraph * Compelling from the beginning. In precise, economic prose Riley conveys a sense of Edwyn and Neve's intimate relationship... An engrossing novel and Riley's writing shines through -- Susannah Butter * Evening Standard * Gwendoline Riley [is] a fascinating novelist... She takes a familiar theme of midlife minor angst and focuses in, closer and closer, until the banal becomes surreal, even beautiful. The effect is beguiling... First Love is an exquisite and combative piece of news from nowhere - which is everywhere, too -- Joanna Kavenna * Guardian * Riley's descriptive powers [are] masterful... First Love is suffused with gems... Original and unforgettable -- Violet Hudson * Mail on Sunday * Exceptionally good... an impossible little wonder of a book, terrifying and horrible... Take up the gauntlet with Gwendoline Riley: it's worth it -- Alex Clark * TLS * Devastating and stylish -- Alex Preston * Observer * An intimate, uncompromising anatomy of love and revulsion between husband and wife, child and parents, from a writer of singular vision * Guardian * From Turgenev's First Love to Gwendoline Riley's is not so very far; the same panoptic, all-too-human lurches, afflictions and doubts, gorgeously exposed. Riley's artistry continues to signal the rueful need to narrate - yet the nobility of that impulse: undetermined, impetuous, diffident - just as we live and love - with heartbreak always in wait -- Alan Warner Gwendoline Riley writes beautifully and memorably. First Love is evocative, often funny, and, towards the end, very moving -- David Szalay Visceral... almost impossible to turn away from -- Anthony Cummins * New Statesman * Riley's First Love maps the ins and outs of human emotion. It will dazzle you * Stylist * Makes you question what love is... [Riley] should be on every literary lover's bookshelf -- Sharmaine Lovegrove * Monocle Radio * Riley writes in pared-back, deceptively light sentences that twist and turn the emotional landscape almost imperceptibly. Dialogue, too, is witheringly precise, often funny. First Love says something very honest about relationships -- Francesca Angelini * Sunday Times * Riley brings you up short with almost every spiky sentence in this stealthy, penetrating novel that recasts love as a dark, terrific puzzle, perhaps never to be solved -- Claire Allfree * Daily Mail * A modern-day Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? * Tatler * This is, in a truly wonderful way, a perfectly horrible little novel... It is exact and exacting, [told] in pristine prose... Without giving away the ending, there is no simple ending... It is a plagal cadence, a wistful, imperfect resolution, a kind of blessing in its own way -- Stuart Kelly * Scotland on Sunday * [With] rich character depictions [...] Riley teases out a series of painful but exquisitely comedic episodes -- John Burnside * Spectator * Expect to read a forensic discussion of the ordinariness of life rendered bittersweet -- Elizabeth White * Vogue * A book of extraordinary potency that does full justice to the appalling tangles into which the heart can lead us -- Stephanie Cross * Lady * [Filled] with moments of humour and tenderness * Radio Times * A brutal book and it will stay with you long after the hundred and sixty pages are over, but Riley manages to inject it with a thin vein of black humour -- Daniel Carpenter * Bookmunch * A book which unflinchingly explores toxic relationships... A beguiling novel -- Theresa Munoz * National * A short but devastating sucker punch of a book -- Eleanor Franzen * Shiny New Books * An incisive and often chilling portrait of the narrator's mother: one of the great comic monsters of recent fiction -- James Walton * Spectator * Outstanding... shot through with moments of almost sinister tenderness -- Anthony Cummins * Daily Telegraph * This exquisite, disquieting novella is a minute portrait of a marriage that disintegrates into a horror in such gradual steps that each feels like a sting * Daily Telegraph * Riley's prose is so electric, so alive with humour and insight and passion, that by the end you will want to stand up and cheer -- Paul Murray * Observer * Riley is a writer who cuts right to the heart of things... raw, fierce and true -- Rupert Thomson * Observer *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 191 mm
Width: 130 mm
Thickness: 27 mm
Weight
124 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-80351-356-0 (9781803513560)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Gwendoline Riley was born in London in 1979 and has been hailed as one of the most significant young British writers. She is is the author of six novels, including My Phantoms, which was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, and First Love, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Literature, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She has also been awarded a Betty Trask Award and a Somerset Maugham Award, and has been shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In 2018, the Times Literary Supplement named her as one of the twenty best British and Irish novelists working today.