A Kind of Intimacy

A quirky, character driven and darkly comic début in the tone of Notes on A Scandal , this novel is an offbeat and ironic study of misunderstandings. It traces the dark possibilities of best intentions going awry and gives an unsettling glimpse into a clumsy young woman who has too much in common with the rest of us to be written off as a monster. Annie moves into her new home bringing little else but her cat and a collection of cow-shaped milk jugs. She's hoping for a clean slate, but there is something familiar about her next door neighbour - she's convinced she's seen him somewhere before. Annie is morbidly obese, lonely and hopeful. She narrates her own increasingly bizarre attempts to ingratiate herself with her new neighbours, to learn from past mistakes and achieve a 'certain kind of intimacy' with the boy next door. Undeterred by her target's hostile girlfriend, she searches for guidance, obsessively studying self-help literature and romance novels. Though Annie struggles to repress a murky history of violence, secrets and sexual mishaps her past is never too far behind her, finally shattering her denial in a compelling and bloody climax "Annie Fairhurst bears a resemblance to Stephen King's Annie Wilkes (from Misery) and Ashworth is playing with the horror genre here, although the reader doesn't realize this for quite some time"--Cover.