Understanding Your Past Won’t Liberate You
In the world of Gwendoline Riley’s novels, a parent’s love is not to be trusted. What should come innately here seems skewed and conditional. A reader gets the clear sense that nothing—not even this supposedly pure emotion—comes without a cost.Such tension is at the core of her novels, as difficulties in her narrators’ present lives are set against familial discord and fraught relations between parents and children. Riley has earned a devoted readership in the U.K.