So I Am Glad

She made her American debut last year to glowing reviews with her acclaimed short novel Original Bliss ("A world-class fiction writer"  --Thomas Lynch, New York Times Book Review; "Like no other book . . . Erotic and funny . . . A high-wire act"  --Daphne Merkin, The New Yorker). Now, in her first full-length novel to appear in this country, the prize-winning Scottish novelist A. L. Kennedy returns to the themes of isolation, emotional destitution and love with an ambitious, darkly funny book -- part love story, part ghost story -- that confirms her place as one of the most brilliantly inventive writers of her generation.

Jennifer Wilson is by vocation a disembodied voice, a radio announcer hiding from her life in a job that perfectly suits her constitution by allowing her to remain audible but invisible, protected by an invincible wall of anonymity. Then one day a new boarder appears at the house she shares in Glasgow, a stranger who she discovers is -- preposterously, impossibly -- Cyrano de Bergerac back from the dead. With terrific wit and compassion, Kennedy's novel tracks their painful movement towards connection, the progress of an improbable but deeply passionate love affair between a lost soul wandering the world trying to remember who he is -- longing to be a hero, longing to be known -- and a comically self-protected young woman who is equally unable to inhabit her own life, unable to feel anything at all, until she surrenders herself to the apparition of a great love.

Once again, A. L. Kennedy has created an unforgettable world, not so unlike our own, populated by heroic misfits who are unwittingly drawn into exhilarating, terrifying adventures that require all their bravery and love. So I Am Glad -- awarded three prizes in Scotland -- is sure to delight fans old and new.