Only Ever Yours by Louise
O'Neill
Release Date: 05/12/15
Quercus/Hachette
398 pages
~Summary~
Where
women are created for the pleasure of men, beauty is the first duty of every
girl. In Louise O'Neill's world of Only
Every Yours women are no longer born naturally, girls (called
"eves") are raised in Schools and trained in the arts of pleasing men
until they come of age. Freida and Isabel are best friends.
Now,
aged sixteen and in their final year, they expect to be selected as companions--wives
to powerful men. All they have to do is ensure they stay in the top ten
beautiful girls in their year. The alternatives--life as a concubine, or a
chastity (teaching endless generations of girls)--are too horrible to
contemplate.
But
as the intensity of final year takes hold, the pressure to be perfect mounts.
Isabel starts to self-destruct, putting her beauty--her only asset--in peril.
And then into this sealed female environment, the boys arrive, eager to choose
a bride. Freida must fight for her future--even if it means betraying the only
friend, the only love, she has ever known.
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Praise for Only Ever Yours
"Terrifying and heartbreaking,
O'Neill's story reads like an heir to Margaret Atwood's The
Handmaid's Tale and M.T. Anderson's Feed, and, like those
books, it's sure to be discussed for years to come."
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"A dark dream. A vivid nightmare. The world
O'Neill imagines is frightening because it could come true. She writes with a
scalpel."
—Jeanette Winterson
"An ingenious exploration of gender roles,
female identity, and female competition."
—Buzzfeed
“Unbelievably believable, compelling, utterly
riveting... Whilst it is dark, uncompromising and utterly daunting to read
as a woman, it is and should be a classic in the making."
—Liz Loves Books
~About the Author~
Louise O' Neill is from Clonakilty, in west Cork. After
graduating with a BA in English Studies at Trinity College Dublin, she went on
to complete a post-grad in Fashion Buying at DIT. Having spent a year in New
York working for Kate Lanphear, the senior Style Director of ELLE magazine, she
returned home to Ireland to write her first novel.
She went from hanging out on set with A-list celebrities to spending most of
her days in pyjamas while she writes, and has never been happier.
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~Guest Post~
Hello,
There are two questions that
everyone asks, when they hear that I’m an author.
- “Where do your ideas come from?
This seems to imply that I’m
either stealing my ideas from other people (I’m not. I promise) or that I’m
likely to run out of ideas in the near future. Both options are terrifying and
haunt my dreams now.
- Did you always dream of being a writer?
The second question is
easier to answer without breaking out in a cold sweat. No, I didn’t always want
to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress although there was a brief period
where I thought I might become a nun much to the delight of my grandparents.
The joys of a Catholic childhood. While I didn’t harbour any ambitions to
become an author, I always wrote. I kept journals from the age of eight, I
wrote short stories and incredibly bad poetry as a teenager. Writing was my way
of making sense of the world. Sometimes, I have to sit and start to write
before I can begin to understand how I feel about something in my life. My
opinion is formed through my pen.
I studied English Literature
at Trinity College, Dublin and it was here, walking on the same cobblestones as
Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and Samuel Beckett did before me, that I decided I
would try to make words, beautiful words, my career.
Life is not always so
simple.
At 25, I started working as
a fashion intern for the Senior Style Director at ELLE magazine in New York. There are no The Devil Wears Prada type stories – she was lovely and kind and
supportive. Yet I wasn’t happy. Faced constantly with fashion’s obsession with
extreme thinness, the anorexia that I had battled as a teenager re-surfaced and
I relapsed.
It was January 2011. I was
sitting in a Starbucks in Brooklyn, waiting for the Q Train to start running
again. I was reading a trashy gossip magazine, poring over photos of
celebrities with ‘circles of shame’ drawn around their cellulite, stomach
rolls, sweat patches. There is a woman sitting near me who is eating a muffin
and I am fascinated by her. How can she eat that muffin and seem so carefree?
Why is she not having an existential crisis over the calories that are in that
muffin?
I was hungry. I wanted a
muffin. But I thought if I ate a muffin, I would get fat. If I ate a muffin, I
would have failed.
Suddenly, a vision flared in
my mind. It was bold, bright, beautiful. It was a young girl, standing in her
bikini in front of a classroom while an older woman with a bald head was
standing in front of her. The older woman had a red marker in her hand and she
was drawing circles around the young girl’s ‘fat areas’ while the rest of the
classroom chanted FAT. FAT. FAT. I grabbed my notebook and I started writing.
A world in which girls are
bred for their beauty.
Why? Because women are no
longer able to bear daughters. Their wombs will only accept a male fetus.
I sat in that coffee shop
for two hours, scribbling pages and pages of notes but it wasn’t until March
2012, when I had returned home to Ireland, that I started to write what would
eventually become Only Ever Yours.
I began sending it to
literary agents in November 2012 and the reaction was instantaneous. Within a
week, agents wanted to see the full manuscript. I had offers from five agents,
some of whom were amongst the most well respected in the world. I had offers
from a number of different publishers, finally signing with Quercus in May
2013.
Only Ever Yours was published in Ireland and the UK in July
2014 and my world has been irrevocably altered. While the awards and the rave
reviews are gratifying, it is the reaction from readers that has been incredibly
humbling. I receive letters and emails almost daily from women who want to
share their stories with me and who want to tell me how my book has changed
their outlook on life. That people have connected on such a deep emotional
level with my work is something that I dreamed of but could barely hope for.
I truly hope that you enjoy Only Ever Yours. You can find me on
Twitter @oneilllo to either message me or to read my increasingly inappropriate
ramblings!
-Louise
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