Getting Colder

by Amanda Coe

A bitingly comic exploration of an unforgettably dysfunctional family, from a writer who wields great "comic rhythm" (The New Yorker). This ferociously funny family saga journeys into the mysteries of many kinds of love.

England, 1983. A celebrated love story entertains the nation: Patrick, the sexy young playwright, scourge of an enthralled establishment, marries Sara, who has abandoned her two children to fulfill her destiny as Patrick’s beautiful, devoted muse. Thirty-five years later, Sara’s death leaves Patrick alone in their crumbling house in Cornwall, with his whisky, his writer’s block and his undimmed rage against the world. The children Sara left behind, Louise and Nigel, are now adults—with memories, questions and agendas of their own. What was their mother really like? Why did she leave them? What has she left them? And how can Patrick carry on without the love of his life?

As versions of the past collide with realities in the present, Sara’s heirs do battle over ownership of this much beloved woman. But the closer Louise and Nigel get to the true story of Sara’s great love affair, the greater its mystery. Secrets and lies, scenes and letters: how do any of us piece together the people who made us what we are?

Genres: Fiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published November 6, 2014

About the author

Amanda Coe is a screenwriter and filmmaker whose television credits include the British series Shameless. She lives in London with her husband and two children.

Reviews

[Maxine (Booklover Catlady) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Getting Colder is a sometimes witty, other times melancholy, novel of satire that was unlike anything I have read for a while. It has no loud bells and whistles, but is a subtle novel that draws you into the lives of some really exceptional characters.

What's the book about?

They were colour-supplement darlings of the 1980s: Patrick, the sexy, ferocious young playwright, scourge of an enthralled establishment, and Sara, who abandoned her two children to fulfil her destiny as Patrick's beautiful, devoted wife and muse.

Thirty-five years later, Sara's death leaves Patrick alone in their crumbling house in Cornwall, with his whisky, his writer's block and his undimmed rage against the world. But bereavement is no respecter of life's estrangements, and Sara's children, Louise and Nigel, are now adults, with memories, questions and agendas of their own. What was their mother really like? Why did she leave them? What has she left them? And how can Patrick carry on without the love of his life?

Getting Colder is a painfully funny and perceptive novel about family, love, and how sometimes the harder you look, the less you find.

My Review:

Sara has passed away, this brings the family together, all converging on Patrick (who is Louise and Nigel's stepfather essentially), this is not a very happy family reunion. Sara had abandoned her family to be with Patrick 35 years earlier and feelings run deep around it all. She's gone now, but everyone else is still living in the ripples of her decision.

Patrick is a stand out character in this book, somewhat eccentric, grouchy, rude, selfish and brash. But in his hey day he was a creative genius, after writing a series of plays, one of which was hugely successful and helped make Patrick and Sara wealthy at the time.

The adult children try to know Patrick, and it's not easy as feelings run deep, Patrick is not exactly the warm father figure type, in fact he's quite the opposite, children would have been quite a nuisance to his need for quiet to be creative and do his work. Louise and Nigel know little of their Mother and how she lived her life, there is a burning need to know things.

It's about a dysfunctional situation, but in the midst of a lot of sadness and anger there are some very witty, funny moments in this book, heart warming even in places.

Patrick was my favourite character by far, flawed in so many ways, multi-dimensional too, I went through a love/hate relationship with Patrick throughout this novel, he grew on me though as time went on.

A young woman had arranged to interview Sara and Patrick and is unaware of Sara's death and turns up in the midst of the funeral and the grieving and questions that are going on. She imparts a whole other level of feeling to the novel, I can't share much more about her due to spoiling it for you, but I loved the fact she was in this book and adored her character for many reasons. Very clever writing.

Some things in this book totally took me aside, some moments that shocked me, even ones I saw coming but when they happened I was still in awe of the event. This is not a fast paced novel by any means, nor is it full of action, at times dark and brooding even, moving along revealing it's magic slowly, bit by bit. It's an in-depth study of a complex family.

As the adult children get to know more about their Mother whom essentially they lost, feelings run high and words are said that can't be taken back. It's got a lot of deep emotional moments in this book. It's one to curl up with when you can give it your full attention. For fans of books that explore human relationships, secrets, marriage and family. A very well written book by Amanda Coe that I really enjoyed reading.

This book was given to me thanks to the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Lucille · Rating 4 out of 5]



“Falling in love is like a song on the radio.”

That’s the last line of the book “The Love She Left Behind”, and also the last line of a short class exercise written by the “She” of the title, an assignment done for an intro to english composition course in an adult education curriculum at the nearby college. What’s left behind in this snippet is a brief autobiographical retelling of how it happened that the composition’s writer had left behind her family. “She” describes how at 30, a beautiful but bored mother of two young children, while still living in her hometown and working as a clerk in the local pharmacy, was swept off her feet by the chance appearance of Patrick, a university lecturer and fledgling playwright, who left his taxi’s meter running outside as he pointedly entered the drugstore to ask for directions to the local college where he was scheduled to speak.

In this brief piece, “She” describes his hair, “greasy black and beautiful.” “She” describes his eyes, dark and beautiful, “like an animal’s eyes, so alive, so outside her and everything about her. Him. She can’t believe the sight of him, but there he is.

Falling in love is like a song on the radio.”

Her name is Sally, they begin a red hot very sexually charged affair, and quickly Patrick implores her to leave everything and everyone behind, and live with him forever. Sally is initially reluctant to leave her husband and children, and reasons staying in her dull marriage because her husband begs her to, claims he loves her desperately, and has promised her a new kitchen. Sally is well aware, and Patrick is very direct in this, that he wants her only — not her children, Nigel and Louise. Instead, and though he despises country life and anything smacking of the bourgeoise, Patrick concedes that he is willing to tolerate the compromise of a house in lieu of children. He promised to buy her a grand country house, something that would have been well outside the means of her bland workaday husband, and relieve her at least of the burden of her son Nigel by pledging to send the boy to private boarding school. Patrick is able to fulfill these promises due to the incredible critical and financial success of having his play “Bloody Empire” eventually make it to the West End, with the added allure that it afforded them both a level of fame and acclaim as a glamorous and celebrated couple. Thus Sally, now renamed a less mundane sounding Sara by Patrick, divorces her husband, ships Nigel off to private boarding school, and deposits the leftover child Louise on her spinster sister’s doorstep, as Patrick’s bank account wouldn’t accommodate private schooling for both kids. Unfortunately, the children’s abandonment was complete in that their father bitterly acquiesced to this arrangement, quickly found himself another mate, and started a new family. Much as their mother, the father had rare contact with his two children over the next decades.

Once married, Sara excitedly settled into her country home with Patrick, spending the next 30 plus years there during which “She” fleetingly saw her children and stayed in sporadic touch usually by means of holiday cards and gift checks. Patrick had even less contact with any further professional success after “Bloody Empire”, never attaining anywhere near the acclaim of his hit play, and was still having to supplement his income as a guest lecturer — a side hustle he despised. Years would pass in which the children wouldn’t see their mother, and when they did it was always a brief uncomfortable lunch or dinner, where “She” was smilingly aloof, always making (unkept) promises for future celebrations, while Patrick was aggressively and unapologetically irascible.

The book opens when a phone call from a neighbor of Sara’s alerts Nigel to his mother’s sudden death prompting Nigel and Louise, now both adults with children of their own, to converge on the home where Patrick still lives to attend their mother’s wake and settle her estate. Legally, Patrick had long past put both the house and the rights to “Bloody Empire” in Sara’s name with Nigel and Louise as her heirs, so the legalities of her estate and what was rightfully left to them would have to be worked out between the three parties. Emotionally, Nigel and Louise were left uniquely damaged people, and their forced separation from each other as children had rendered them estranged. Though Nigel is professionally successful as a lawyer thanks in part to the private education Patrick underwrote, he is a deeply unhappy, nervously unhealthy father of two small boys, married to a controlling and cold wife. Louise is an hysteric, overweight and overwrought single mother of two disaffected and troubled children: an adult slacker son and a preteen daughter who is ripe prey for older male predators.

The only thing Nigel and Louise seem to have in common is a shared belief that their mother’s romance with Patrick never slackened in it’s intensity, and was so consuming and compelling that it justified her abandonment of them. A love like a force of nature, as described by Sara’s sister. A love that excluded everyone and everything else. A love in which Sara focused any residual maternal care solely on Patrick, and was slavishly devoted to him. Both Nigel and Louise seem determined to believe in this grand love since it makes Sara’s abandonment of them a little less monstrous. Even friends of the couple claimed that Sara was so jealous of Patrick, and wanted him solely to herself, that she purposely interfered with his writing. But there is an incident early in the story when Patrick angrily grabs his old fashioned radio from Louise’s daughter’s hands and smashes it to pieces that seems to foretell the truth. It was this incident I immediately referenced when I read the last line in the book, written by Sara: “Falling in love is like a song on the radio.”

As they prepare for the wake, both Nigel and Louise question why they hadn’t been informed of their mother’s illness, and it was revealed that she had only been diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer the week before she died at home. Sara had insisted that the doctor not tell Patrick of her advanced terminal condition, so her death was a shock to him also. Was Sara protecting Patrick from the distress of having to face the finality of her days? Or was it something else? Both Nigel and Louise puzzle at how it would be possible to hide the suffering an advanced stage of stomach cancer would likely visit on someone so afflicted; it seems an implausibility that a condition that severe and dire, causing such an obvious deterioration in health and physical appearance, would escape notice. Were there no telltale signs, over the months that this cancer would have been present and growing? Could it be that the brevity of time between her actual diagnosis and her death explain Patrick’s lack of notice? Or had Sara bravely hidden her misery from him, for months? Had Patrick been so exclusively absorbed in his writing that he didn’t see how sick Sara was? So much of their mother and her life was and is a mystery to them. But as Louise is going through her mother’s personal effects, she begins to question the truth of this ‘great love’ as she discovers that Sara had been sleeping in a separate bedroom from Patrick for quite a long time.

In the end, it’s a fragment of what appears to be a journal entry that is found in Sara’s car and in her handwriting that gives some clue to their mother’s internal dialog and emotional life:

“…face any of it. Oh God let it be over. Lies. Every day the same. You get what you deserve. Every day. The way he looks at me, always. Touches even. Hate. Please no more hurting. Hate hate hate hate. The only thing I can do is try to live and ……”

When shown Sara’s found confession, one that she never confided in anyone, Patrick admits that she had hated him, inexplicably and for a very long time … though he had remained devoted and slavishly in love with her. She would regularly disappear to London to ‘visit friends’, to get away from him, but she never confided her misery to them. When asked if she had interfered with his writing as had been alleged, Patrick admits that Sara “didn’t care enough to stop me doing anything.” And still ‘She’ had stayed, through every miserable minute of every day of thirty plus years, allowing their home to crumble and become filthy and decrepit, a grim, sad trap of an exterior that mirrored her interior. What Sara ultimately leaves behind is regret and self-loathing. When the predator who had been trying to lure Louise’s daughter to meet him appears at the front door, Patrick in an outrage at the intrusion thunderously slams the door shut, causing the facade of the house to crumble in a heap due to its deteriorated foundation. A crumbling that was long overdue.

Coe’s talent in being able to layer this story in a way that it is alternately haunting, and heartbreaking, and hilarious, is really astonishing. Really well done.

[Blair]

February 2015
Coe’s much-criticised first novel, What They Do in the Dark, was a book I enjoyed, and I think it’s generally quite underrated. I hoped for great things from the follow-up, but the awful cover didn’t give a great first impression, and Getting Colder bored me from the first page. I had two stabs at it, but had to conclude that I just didn't want to read about this family.

[Bookread2day · Rating 5 out of 5]

This sad story is about Sara a mother of two who leaves them to be with sexy playwright Patrick. Sara is sent sexy letters by Patrick. After 35 years Sara dies leaving Patrick alone in his crumbling house in Cornwall. Sara's children Louise and Nigel who are now adults want answers from Patrick how their mother died, they are finding it hard to come to terms that their mother suddenly died. And Sara has ideas about the crumbling house. I recommend Getting Colder to readers that like reading about family problems. This story has left me haunted long after I had finished it

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intense novel of the realities of family dysfunction combined with psychological intrigue are skillfully explored in Amanda Coe's "The Love She Left Behind: A Novel" (2015). This novel was released in the U.K. as "Getting Colder" (2014).

In 1983: Patrick Conway, a famous bachelor British playwright married 30 year old Sara, who left behind a husband and two small children to devote her life to him. The story opens some 35 years later, after Sara's sudden unexpected death from stomach cancer. Patrick notified her adult children Nigel and Louise (through a neighbor) that their mother had passed, and invited them to his home in Cornwall to assist him in sorting through their mother's belongings. After years of family estrangement, this was surprising, as neither Nigel or Louise knew Sara was even ill. The once grand villa at Cornwall, was in a run down state of disrepair suggesting Patrick and Sara were too elderly or infirm to care for their home or maintain family connections.

Nigel and Louise were estranged, and barely familiar with one another. In grieving and highly conflicted emotional state, they sought closure and remaining hope of evidence of their mothers love for them.
Patrick, a raging elderly geezer who smoked drank whiskey to deal with writers block, distraught over Sara's death, mired in his own grief. Unchanging, Patrick's temperamental attitude, distance, the selfishness necessary maintain his creative edge as a one time gifted playwright.
Nigel, an unhappy emotionally distant solicitor, an indecisive father of two wrangles over the content of his mothers will. The sadness and disconnection he felt from his wife Sophie, leading him to question and over analyze his actions and emotions, as he wanted to do the right thing in his family haunted by maternal abandonment.
Louise, a single mother of two, is without plans or accomplished goals, unsettled, too disorganized manage her life in a reasonable order. When Louise moved in to stay at the Cornwall villa, Patrick was rude and condescending towards her, not exactly the supportive (step-fatherly) type. There was so much sadness, as Louise was constantly reminded how little she knew her mother as the story went back and forth examining her coming of age beginning in childhood and dealing with the pain of maternal loss. One particular incident: the grand new house in Cornwall was obviously more important and brought Sara more joy than connecting emotionally or nurturing her children.
When Mia arrived ( a carefree MA graduate student) to interview Patrick about his influence and work, this story takes an interesting and engaging turn. Mia also represents possibility, a change, and fresh outlook on this depressing situation, in spite of her own obvious agenda, which adds an interesting and unpredictable element to the storyline.

The reader won't learn the reason why Patrick was important enough to cause Sara to abandon her former husband and children. Patrick, Nigel and Louise were deeply conflicted problematic characters, connected through Sara's seemingly unremarkable life as a wife and muse of a solitary man and his past claim to fame. As the story unfolds between present and past recall of Louise and Nigel's childhood, love notes from Patrick and Sara's courtship, reveal Patrick's obsessive lust and desire Sara as a young mother; also parts of Patrick's scripts from his plays, that add insight to his character.This isn't a tidy story that fits neatly into an author illustrated compartment easily understood and accepted. Instead, with an element of satire, the novel inspires questioning, reflection and examination of how individual life choices have such a profound impact on others.
Amanda Coe is a screenwriter and filmmaker in addition to being a bestselling author. "The Love She Left Behind: A Novel" is her third book, she lives in London with her family..

[T.D. Whittle · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Of course it’s serious, my love, but it’s fucking hilarious!” This is one of my favourite lines from Getting Colder and it suits the whole book, which is a black comedy.

I received an advanced reader’s copy of this book in exchange for a review, and I dived in with eager anticipation. Getting Colder is a fast read that kept me flipping pages as if it were a thriller. It tells the story of an emotionally remote woman — or a highly passionate but repressed one, take your pick — who leaves her husband and children to run off with the (legend has it) great love of her life, a famously drunken and “brilliant” playwright. When the book opens, this woman Sara has died, and her family is attending her funeral. The rest of the book deals with the family individually and collectively coming to terms with how little they really knew or understood this woman who was their mother and wife. Primarily, the story belongs to Nigel, the adult son; Louise, the adult daughter; and Patrick, the playwright husband; though, Louise’s teenage children also play pivotal roles.

In the midst of the family’s post-funeral gathering, when tension and grief are already at full tilt, a young graduate student named Mia shows up to interview Patrick, planning to stay a while. Coe writes her characters well, as if she really knows them. I found Mia to be the most satisfying, in many ways, because she adds intrigue and humour to the story, whilst having the straightforward motivational clarity of a sociopath, e.g. “Sara was only a person, like any other, and what do people matter?”

Patrick, the grieving widower, turns out to be (in a fine and subtle twist by Coe) the most sympathetic character in the book. This is one of the funny things Coe’s writing does to you when reading her book: you find yourself siding with the bullies and wanting to smack the whingers. (To be fair, though, there is a lot of whinging and self pity. One can only take so much.) The character interplay that brought this about, and my response to it, both shamed and amused me. For instance, I was well aware that I should not like Patrick, that a decent and kind human being would feel sorry for his step-daughter Louise when he insults and ridicules her. But, in the context of the book, that’s not what I found myself doing. I found Louise to be such an incredibly annoying and self-deluding fool that whenever Patrick would set her straight, I would tacitly agree with him and cheer him on, as if he were speaking for both of us. (Having said that, there are powerful moments of empathy with Louise, too, so it’s not one-sided, but rather a complex series of vacillating emotions, as we have in our own relationships and lives.)

Coe’s writing is intelligent and clever and nuanced. It gives the reader aesthetic distance: a quiet spot in a dark theatre from to watch the play unfold. I felt removed from these characters and their challenges, always holding the meta perspective rather than lost in the story, but that worked well for this particular book. It allowed me the same experience of remoteness and emotional wanting-in- but-kept-out frustration that the main characters struggle with and mostly fail to resolve. (I kept hearing Little Richard’s “You keep a-knockin’ but you can’t come in!” playing in my head, which is an apt enough theme song, even if it is American and a bit too perky.)

And now, a warning: If you are the sort of reader who needs to like or love your characters, this book is not for you. The characters work brilliantly as an ensemble, but I am not sure I would want to know any of them in real life. Coe is not writing Sophie’s Choice here.

I do not wish to give the plot away, but I would recommend Getting Colder as an especially good read for the holidays. It’s the kind of book you can take to your room with a pot of tea and indulge in for a few hours, with relish. It will make you think about what it is we mean when we say we know and love someone, and whether others mean the same thing when they say it back to us. This book has a way of staying with you, playing around the edges of your mind, for several days after you finish it. Or, it did me, anyway.

[Viktoria Michaelis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some people live in the past, either because they've never managed to come to grips with modern life, or because there are too many good things still left, they believe, which make it worth hanging on to. Yet others look back on the past, especially their own lives, and ask themselves what could have happened to me if... or, what happened around me that was kept hidden? When a family splits up, for whatever reason, the questions become more complicated, filled with wishes and desires, unanswered questions about who might have been at fault, whether life could have been different if only people had stayed together. For some these questions will probably never be answered, they are confronted with them at the most inopportune moments or at a time when life takes a twist, throws them a curve-ball, removes the only person who might have been able to set their mind at ease.

There are also many things in life which simply cannot be understood, the power of love is one of them. How can a person, so well set up in their home life, in their marriage, with their children, suddenly throw it all away and begin afresh? For someone who does not feel the same passion of love, it is almost impossible to explain, and can leave a deep hurt throughout the remaining years alongside the many unanswered, unasked questions. Would life have been different for Nigel and Louise if their mother Sara - or Sally as they knew her - hadn't walked out in the late Seventies, sent them off to live with an Aunt, for Louise, or to a boarding school, for Nigel? What if their mother had never met the 'Darling of the Eighties', as Patrick came to be known when together with her, sharing the spotlight of his dubious fame and the eventual fall from grace?

All three come together once more, following the sudden death of their mother, in Patrick's home, a dilapidated villa hidden away from the public gaze and hope, in their own way, to find answers to many of life's questions. There is the prospect of an inheritance, of a new path through life, of a new start perhaps. And there is also Mia, a young student determined to make her own way upwards, by whatever means who, blinded perhaps by her prospects, throws aside her studies and begins to take control, as far as she can, over Patrick's life. The whole, as all come together with their own complicated backgrounds, with their own problems, with their own memories, brings a delightful, bitterly humorous story of misunderstandings carried on over decades, of expectations unspoken, of questions never asked.

As with life itself, Amanda Coe's new work leaves many questions unanswered, and that is a good thing. We are able, as readers, to place ourselves into the fate-twisted lives of each of the characters, to read their thoughts and almost feel their emotions. There is a certain understanding between the reader and each person portrayed which concentrates itself around that one person and their history, but doesn't impede upon the uniqueness of the other characters, doesn't bring them the answers they need, but lets us, the readers, understand what may have been the cause, what could be the future. And the bitter humor is not just a satire upon the expectations of an emotionally material society, but an insight into ourselves, we who, but for the grace of the fates, could have found ourselves in the same position, might still be faced with it in one way or another. We relate to the characters, and that is what brings a good story to life as much as the setting, the plot, the unexpected turns of fate and fortune.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 1 out of 5]

Waiting for the End

Before getting this, I reread my review of Amanda Coe's debut novel, What They Do in the Dark . I gave it five stars on Amazon, noting that it began as a more-or-less ordinary story of two primary school girls (one privileged, the other not) growing up in a Yorkshire town, but when Coe pulled the threads together at the end, WOW, stand back and await the explosion! So I accepted the more-or-less ordinary beginning of this one—two grown-up children come back to deal with the recent death of their mother—confident that Coe would pull off a similar surprise at the end that would make it all worthwhile. She didn't. The whole book is pretty much as pedestrian at the end as at the beginning, utterly wasting a day of my time.

At the center of the book is Patrick Conway, the once-famous author of a scabrous play in the 1980s that, by sheer coincidence, managed to speak to the country's doubts about the futility of the Falklands War. At the height of his fame, he managed to entice his muse Sara away from her marriage and her responsibilities to her children Nigel and Louise. But his career was never to take off again. When Louise and Nigel arrive at the house Patrick bought on the Cornish cliffs, they find an alcoholic curmudgeon living in a dilapidated shambles.

None of the characters is likable. Nigel, a lawyer, is an ineffectual half-man with a sensitive bowel syndrome. Louise is overweight and jobless, trying to cope with her sullen teenage daughter Holly who, like her mother, has poor taste in boyfriends. Only the graduate student Mia, who descends from Newcastle to interview Patrick for her thesis and ends up hanging around, has got any get-up-and-go or common humanity. Of course, there is always Amanda Coe's writing to keep you going for a while, as cheeky as ever in its feel for the vernacular. The book flap promises secrets and lies and deep mysteries. But all this novel has to offer are wasted lives and shallow muddle. Too feeble a payoff to be worth the bother.

[Kitchen Insights · Rating 1 out of 5]

Kudos to the book jacket writer because they made Amanda Coe's book sound interesting. Unfortunately, the book isn't interesting. If I hadn't read the book jacket I'm not sure I would have known that Patrick and Sara had a "celebrated love story" that apparently entertained the nation. The novel is actually about a women (Sara aka Sally) who abandons her husband and two children for a narcissistic playwright; then dies 30 years later without telling anyone she was ill. The abandoned children, now grown up dysfunctional adults (who wouldn't be with their childhoods?) "battle over ownership of this much beloved women." This is according to the book jacket but I didn't find any such evidence in the book. I found no indication that Sara was loved by anyone except Patrick. But maybe even he didn't really love her since he was pretty quick to want to marry the next young babe who came along. Her daughter, Louise, was desperate for love since her mother, father and brother all deserted her in her youth. I was hoping that something would be discovered which would show that Sara had perhaps just a tiny bit of remorse. Instead, we get an ending which says..."Falling in love is like a song on the radio." If a celebrated love story, or any love, is in this book, I missed it.

[Alma · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nigel and Louise are all grown up but have never forgotten their mother, who abandoned them for another man when they were just children. Her defection from their family created Louise’s lifelong insecurities and Nigel’s aloofness, leading to a rift in their relationship. Having grown apart through the years, they are thrown together when their mother suddenly dies and they are called to the home she shared with her new husband Patrick. Read the rest of the review on my blog: https://shouldireaditornot.wordpress....

[Jamie Jo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book and I even started it 3 different times because I thought maybe I just wasn't in the mood, but the writing just didn't keep me engaged and I found the characters to be rather unlikable.

I think the author is a good writer, and it was clearly well edited, but I had a hard time relating to the story.

There are certainly funny moments though and the book has rave reviews from top reviewers so I think I'm probably a minority in thinking this.

If you like, dark humor, I'd give this book a shot, you'll probably enjoy it more than I did.

[Mind the Book · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sökte något brittiskt och samtida. EHVJR. Intressant, om "life's estrangements":

För 35 år sedan lämnade en tvåbarnsmor sin familj för ett helt annat liv med en känd dramatiker. Nu är hon död. Detta att ha mycket begränsad och ansträngd kontakt med sin mamma påverkade sonen och dottern hela livet, påverkade deras barn, påverkade första makens nya fru, påverkade andra makens nya flickvän etc. etc. etc.

Första romanen där karaktärerna instagrammar blommor, utsikter etc. Finns det fler?

[Trish · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was full of completely dysfunctional characters. None of them have any redeeming qualities. I guess it's a book that can make you feel better about your own life because your life cannot be nearly as screwed up as all of theirs! But the dysfunction is sort of humorous in a dark miserable way.

[Suzanne Sotzing · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had a hard time with this book, perhaps because I'm not familiar with UK terms and sayings. There was humor? I didn't recognize it anywhere. I felt it hard to follow and disjointed as well as not really meaty enough to really want to finish. I did finish, but found it unremarkable. Sorry. Not an enjoyable read for me.

[Darcee Kraus · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a strange, whimsical read. I was shocked, entertained and more than anything emotionally touched. Amanda Coe has a strange, yet enticing writing style. The story took us from the past to the future and conclusion by the end of the story. I would love to read more from Coe.

[Hayley · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not sure why I bothered to finish this book. I don’t like the characters or the vague plot which is probably a misleading word to use since there didn’t seem to be one. Complete rubbish although still preferable to Fifty Shades. Just.

[Janet · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book full of unlikable characters and a lukewarm mystery, but it is saved by really excellent writing that made me keep reading.

[Shannon Trainor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wasn't a fan of this book. None of the characters were likable or interesting.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

The cover blurb suggests that Getting Colder is 'savagely funny and perceptive'. Whilst I agree that this story is incredibly perceptive, for me it was a very sad story with characters and a plot that I would really find difficult to class as 'funny'.

When I read What They Do In The Dark three years ago I was left reeling by the authenticity of Amanda Coe's writing, set as it is in both a setting and an era that is really familiar to me. Despite the fact that it's over three years since I read it, the story had stayed with me. I was expecting more of the same from Coe in Getting Colder. This isn't the same, not by any means, it feels more grown up, mature and more in depth. The shocks are there, but are more subtle and the characters are more intense with a depth that adds volumes to the plot.

This is a story about a family. An unusual family who have drifted apart over the years but are brought together when the mother dies. Sara left her two children Nigel and Louise thirty-five years ago, she met and fell in love with Patrick, was swept away by his glamour and fame, the arty world that he occupied. Her two children were damaged by this, but have also hankered for their mother's love.

Nigel and Louise arrive at the home that Sara shared with Patrick for many years. A home that was always know to them as 'the house', not a second home for them, or a place of happy memories. Patrick seems distraught by Sara's death, he's loud, brash, grumpy, rude and unwelcoming. Nigel is cautious, wary and just a little frightened of Patrick. Louise is older and fatter, a mother of two, unsure of herself and desperately looking for some signs that her mother did love her, did miss her, did regret what she did.

Added to this mix of unhappy, not very pleasant characters is Mia. Mia arrived unexpectedly, hoping to interview Patrick, unaware that Sara has died. Mia is a grasping dreamer, she sees opportunity in the most unlikely of places, she is a schemer and a planner, but even Mia finds the melancholy air of Patrick's house and it's visitors very hard to bear.

Getting Colder is not a fast-paced story, it gently unfolds to reveal the inner feelings of each of the characters. Don't expect to love any of the characters, with the exception of Louise's son Jamie, I certainly didn't like any of them. I'm not sure that the reader is expected to like the characters, and it takes nothing away from this excellent story - who says that all characters should be warm and friendly and likeable anyway?

This is an exploration of fractured family relationships, it looks at ego and self-perception and the fragility of the human being. Moving slowly and quite gently, Getting Colder is cleverly and quite beautifully written.

[Jill Meyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main character in British author Amanda Coe's novel, "The Love She Left Behind", is not alive in most of the book. Sara Conroy - wife of playwright Patrick Conroy - was a "bolter". A "bolter" is that unique term the British use to connote a woman who leaves her husband and children to run off with another man. (Princess Diana's mother was a "bolter" who left Diana and her three siblings and her marriage to Johnnie Spencer for a lover. I don't know if men can be "bolters"; that might be an interesting question. Anyway...)

As the book begins, Sara has just died of stomach cancer, leaving her husband, Patrick, and two children, by now grown. Patrick has written one hit play, "Bloody Empire", first performed in 1982, at the height of the Thatcher reign. He's coasted on his fame since then and has retreated with his wife to a sea-side house in Cornwall. The years have passed and Sara has had an off-and-on relationship with the two children she left years ago. The son, Nigel, was sent to a public school by Patrick and on to Oxford and has become a solicitor. The daughter, Louise, has not fared as well, living in Leeds in a precarious financial position with her two children. The family meets - minus Sara - at Sara's funeral.

Most of the book centers around the cypher - Sara. As a reader I couldn't figure out what Patrick saw in this young mother from Leeds who he persuades to elope with him. As her children, her neglected son and daughter seemed to have a relationship with their mother based more on yearning than on emotional and physical contact. As a new character, a young woman named Mia has come into Patrick's life upon Sara's death and her presence in the house - is she Patrick's girlfriend or carer?

Curiously, as I read this novel, which I enjoyed, I could see it being made into a play. It was sort of "staged" as characters and plots came and went throughout the book. This is a book that will receive a whole range of reviews. I found it interesting but I know many others who wouldn't.

[Damaskcat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sara dies within a week following a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Patrick is devastated and her two children, Nigel and Louise suffer varying degrees of grief. Both have designs on the run down house in which Patrick lives. The story of Patrick and Sara's love affair which caused a great deal of publicity at the time is told in extracts from his letters. Patrick is, or was, an author who wrote one very successful play and Mia, an MA student, comes to interview him as arranged with Sara before her death.

As the family begins to unravel and Louise and her teenage daughter, Holly move in with Patrick for no apparent reason, Mia also becomes part of the household for reasons of her own and is regarded with suspicion by everyone else.

This is a strange book and one in which a great deal is left to the reader's imagination - not to say guesswork. I felt as though maybe it should have been a longer book but that it had been cut down to a specific length. The reader never really gets to know any of the characters and they remained shadowy for me even after I'd finished the book. It is well written and it does show how different people react to grief especially grief for someone who they feel they ought to have loved perhaps more than they did.

I didn't really enjoy the book though others may love it. Perhaps it repays a second reading but I'm not sure I want to spend that much more time with characters I wasn't at all sure I liked that much. I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review purposes.

[Christine Irvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

When their mother passes away, Nigel and Louise are left to deal with their stepfather, Patrick Conway, a playwright who wrote a controversial hit play many years ago. Their mother, Sara, left the children with their father and went to live with Patrick and later marry him. Their father could not care for them himself, so Nigel was sent off to boarding school and Louise went to live with her Aunt B. Neither one of them had hardly any contact with their mother and stepfather after that.

Now that their mother is gone, they must deal with the practicalities and legalities of their mother's estate. This is difficult because they don't know Patrick well and he's a hard man to deal with. The situation is further complicated by the appearance of Mia, a young doctoral student who is writing a thesis and wants to use Patrick as the basis for it.

The story is told from multiple points of view, giving different perspectives on what happened before Sara's death and what happens afterwards.

I somewhat enjoyed reading the story but I must admit that I was confused as to the point of it all. The writer, Amanda Coe is British. As such, she used words and phrases that I'm not particularly familiar with, making some of the text difficult to decipher. And, the ending of the story didn't quite satisfy me, as like I said, I'm not sure what the whole point of the story was. Perhaps you would get more out of it than I did.

[Judy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received this novel from Goodreads as a giveaway in return for an honest review. The story begins as Sara has died leaving her partner Patrick alone and grieving in their house in Cornwall. Sara leaves two adult children, Nigel and Louise, who she abandoned to be with Patrick. Patrick is a writer of some fame and in the eighties they were quite the celebratory couple. The novel explores the relationships between these characters as they come together to grieve. The surprise twist is Mia, the MA student who turns up to interview Patrick as arranged with Sara before her death. Why does she stay to perform the interview in these circumstances?
This is a novel which focuses on the psychological interactions between the characters and it unfolds gradually over the course of the book. The characters are believable but I found it difficult to warm to them. It is well written with the story of Sara and Patrick’s romance being told by way of extracts from letters but it is not a style which appeals to me.
The story goes along at one pace from start to finish and would benefit from something to change the rhythm, for me, as I found it didn’t hold my attention. Readers who like an in depth look into a dysfunctional family dealing with past histories and grieving will really enjoy this book but unfortunately it is not for me.

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received The Love She Left Behind as part of a Goodreads giveaway.

Three decades ago, middle-aged Sara left her husband and two teenage children to be with mercurial playwright Patrick Conway. In the present day, Sara has passed away from a short bout with advanced stomach cancer, and it falls to her children Louise and Nigel, now middle-aged parents themselves, to pick up the pieces and reassess their relationship with a grieving and deeply troubled Patrick.

I suppose I never really got to know the characters particularly well. Everyone was depressed and constantly unsatisfied, and while everyone feels that way at times, it was constant in this narrative, and those negative emotions seemed to control the characters and the tenor of the story. Basically, I felt like the need to communicate that everyone was defeated by life overpowered everything else. Still, I feel like it deftly examined the complicated relationships that develop out of infidelity--the familiarity of someone who has been in your life a long time, coupled with the wariness that comes from distrust. The way the characters walked a fine line around Patrick and Sara's relationship was really very well done; I just wish we could have moved past constant doom and gloom into something a bit deeper.

[Martha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I laughed through this novel, though I felt like I missed a lot of the humor because so many ways of speaking were very British, along with some regionalisms. But it's not hard to catch the drift : a brother and sister damaged by the departure of their mother for a then-renowned playwright converge on their mother's home (and the bristly, drunken, caustic mouthed playwright) after her death some 30 years later. In tow are their own families and into the mix arrives a graduate student who is there to interview the playwright. Memories are slippery and mother, Sara (once Sally) is a tough personality to pin down. Playwright Patrick adored her at one time, but did she adore him back? Her fondness for her children is questionable, but they search for her in their memories, each concocting a different person from the bits they remember. Meanwhile, complications bring them back again and again to the falling down house in Cornwall where Patrick still lives and drinks, and quite the comedy erupts.

[Pamela · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a Goodreads First Reads giveaway - thanks to Goodreads and Little

An intriguing contemporary novel. Sara has died, leaving her partner Patrick lost and grieving at their run down house in Cornwall. Sara's adult children Nigel and Louise arrive to sort out their mother's affairs. The novel examines the family relationships, how Sara's abandonment of her children affected them, the impact of the affair on Patrick's writing career, and the reality of the love affair between Patrick and Sara.

The characters in this novel are all flawed and damaged, but gradually we come to see how Sara's actions and personality have affected all of them. Their assumptions are challenged and broken down in a skilful way. There are flashbacks to Nigel and Louise's childhoods, their attempts to understand the elusive Sara, and the complications of their own relationships with partners and children. It is a compelling novel, often witty, and has a flowing style that makes it easy to read.

[Melana · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this advanced reading copy of The Love She Left Behind for free through Goodreads First Read Giveaway.
The cover blurb described this book as “a ferociously funny family saga”. The only thing that I found comic was the state of the house at the end. Sara left her family to start a new life with Patrick. Did Sara love Patrick as much as he loved her? Louise and Nigel (her children by her first husband) separated, one sent to school and another sent to live with an aunt. We get a little insight as to why they (Louise and Nigel) turned out as they did as adults. There is a smattering of political history in reference to Patrick’s play. An opportunistic (and slightly sociopathic) grad student is Patrick’s new “muse”. I enjoyed the writing, I liked the dysfunctional characters, but I’m afraid that the ambiguity at the end will be off-putting to some readers.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

In compliance with FTC guidelines, I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.
Although I managed to get through this book quite quickly, it left me disappointed. The story details the lives of several family members dealing with the death of a loved one. Without giving too much away there are a couple of characters who are self obsessed and selfish, who I really wanted to get their comeuppance, but it never really happened, leaving the ending all a bit deflating like "is that it?". Although by the end even the characters you might have warmed too slightly, or felt sorry for, all turn out to be selfish in the end. But maybe that's the point of the story. 'Getting Colder' was my reaction to everyone by the end of the book, apart from Jamie.

[Mark Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting, sometimes uncomfortable, book narrating the difficulties of a family torn apart by perceived love. As each person strives to find the thing that makes them happy their happiness seems to move further away - it gets colder. The story moves between the present and the past in a way that doesn't exactly explain how current events came to pass, but rather how the characters came to be the way they are. All except Patrick - the playwright who is the original reason the family were torn apart. What a hideous creation he is and I daresay there are plenty of similar egocentric people in real life. I sincerely hope Amanda Coe hasn't drawn on real life to create him.

Not as funny as the cover suggests, but certainly as dark and perceptive.

[Sally Koslow · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Love She Left Behind is a quick read in every sense of the word. It’s a devout-in-a-long-plane-ride book, and its witty, more so as it unfolds, as if it took the author, Amanda Coe, a while to trust herself to write droll sentences like: “The clientele seemed very young, with odd bits of their hair shaved off and extensive beards on the men, and they were all dressed like extras from a period drama set in the American Depression.” Coe introduces about a dozen characters in approximately 250 pages, yet manages to render them all well. The plot revolves around the trope of a family getting to know a loved one’s secrets after death. Jonathan Tropper’s This is Where I Leave You comes to mind. If there were a way to give a book four-and-a-half stars, I would, only for this reason.