Skip to main content

Gun love

Clement, Jennifer, author2018 - 2019
A hypnotic story of family, community and violence. This is a young girl's account of the romantic culmination of America's love affair with firearms and its painful consequences. **Longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction 2018** `Haunting ... poetic ... Full of sorrow and aching sweetness' Washington Post Gun Love is a hypnotic story of family, community and violence. Told from the perspective of a sharp-eyed teenager, it exposes America's love affair with firearms and its painful consequences. `My mother called anyone or anything that seemed alone, or ended up in the wrong place, a stray. There were stray people, stray dogs, stray bullets, and stray butterflies.' Fourteen-year-old Pearl France lives in the front seat of a broken down car and her mother Margot lives in the back. Together they survive on a diet of powdered milk and bug spray, love songs and stolen cigarettes. Life on the edge of a Florida trailer park is strange enough, but when Pastor Rex's `Guns for God' programme brings Eli Redmond to town Pearl's world is upended. Eli pays regular visits to Margot in the back seat, forcing Pearl to find a world beyond the car. Margot is given a gift by Eli, a gun of her own, just like he's given her flowers. It sits under the driver's seat, a dark presence. `One of those rare books that the reader might wish to be a few dozen pages longer, to spend more time in this fully realised world ` Observer
Main title:
Gun love
Creator:
Date Published:
2018 - 2019
Language:
English
Clear current selections
items currently selected
View my active saved list
0 items in my active saved list