There isn't much of a plot to speak of, beyond the shifting dynamics and relationships built between them, namely Cleo and Frank, a semi-green-card marriage built mostly on passion and age difference, and those around them: Frank's younger half-sister, Zoë; Frank's friends, Anders, and another more boring and half-hearted inclusion whose name I don't remember; Cleo's best friend Quentin; Zoë's best friend Audrey; and finally, ELEANOR. Cleopatra and Frankenstein, the luminous debut novel from Coco Mellors, is a book about many things: It's a great, swooning love story; a shattering depiction of how addiction and mental illness warp our lives; and a perceptive, witty portrait of globalized New York. Later, as they lay naked in each other’s arms, the mosquito net breathing softly around them, Cleo turned to his profile”. these ppl are boring and the author's attempts to make them into rooney-esque figures, well, tis' cringe. A tender, devastating and funny exploration of love and friendship and the yearning for self-evisceration.

I started off quite enjoying the vibe of this (because that’s all it’s really offering is a vibe) but I’ve never read a book that is more up itself.Mellors does not have the writing skill nor does she have the ability to capture certain aspects of life that Rooney can so naturally do. I became both tired of it and I also desperately wanted to go back to its pages, its got the push and pull of a toxic relationship, a clever tool used to mimic the central relationship in the novel.

He offers her the chance to be happy, the freedom to paint, and the opportunity to apply for a Green Card. I'm more of a complicated, unconventional, dark, realistic, modern-day kind of romance; where there's turbulence and you're unsure of how it will end and if they should even end up together or not. Mellors’ remarkably assured and sensitive debut … strongly evoke[s] Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life… At its core, it’s a novel about how love and lovers are easily misinterpreted and how romantic troubles affect friends and family. It's the latest in a string of literary fiction pieces that I've read that feel aspirational to that title.Part of me longed to get to the bits where her quirky personality hit the pages and her relationship with Frank was seen through, because that is what they both deserved. Needless to say, they are not: Wayward Cleo flexes with the fact that her husband pays, Frank lives his life like he's collecting stories he can tell at drug-fuelled parties (which should also show that this is clearly not an effort in the vein of Sally Rooney, the politics are fundamentally different and here, feminism mainly features as a rhetorical gimmick). they're all self-absorbed immature people who cannot empathise with others and cannot think of anybody but themselves. Ultimately, this chance meeting between two strangers outside of a New Year's Eve party changes everything, for better or worse.