Gun Love
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
**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
*Soon to be a film adaptation directed by Julie Taymor*
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her excellent fifth novel, Clement (Prays for the Stolen) tackles homelessness, America's love affair with guns, and the economic despair of folks living on the dark edge of society. Pearl is a 14-year-old girl living with her mother in an old car next to a crummy trailer park and the town dump in central Florida. The car has been their home since Pearl was born. She and her mother are dreamers ("It doesn't take too long to figure out that dreams are better than life," says her mother), but their dreams don't spare them from tragedy when cop-killing charmer Eli shows up and woos Pearl's mother, coming between mother and daughter. Eli and trailer neighbors Pastor Rex and Ray are in the gun-running business, selling weapons in Texas and Mexico. When Pearl's small, insular world is shattered by an armed drifter, she starts on a dangerous path that will change the rest of her life. Clement's affecting and memorable novel is also an incisive social commentary that will give readers much to ponder.
