276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Penance: From the author of BOY PARTS

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

The three years Penance took to write were, she says, akin to pulling teeth, unlike the pleasure she got from Boy Parts, a mischievous satire narrated by a predatory photographer whose images of her male victims are hailed at a hip London gallery as edgy roleplay. “People who’ve read it maybe think I’ll be more of a wind-up merchant when they meet me, but I’ve got more of a primary school teacher energy than an enfant terrible vibe,” Clark says.

EC: Very funny. It’s just two very funny words to put together. Actually, it was the donkey strangling that led me to giving the novel this British seaside setting. Also, the guy shooting seagulls with a crossbow, that was Scarborough.Penance is, first and foremost, a novel about crafting your own narrative. It features a gallery of varyingly unreliable, manipulative characters who—consciously or not—are all supremely concerned with creating a self-serving story to absolve themselves from any responsibility in the book’s central event, the gruesome murder of a teenage girl. Maybe more so because I’d only just read Clark’s incredible Boy Parts last week, so my expectations going in were slighter higher than I thought they would be ? Barry Pierce: I feel Penance is coming out at a perfect time because it feels we are somewhat endlessly in a cycle where people are questioning the ethics of true crime, be it through books or through Netflix series. Was that on your mind when you were writing the book? Written when she was 24, in eight months of weekends off from a day job at Newcastle’s Apple store, Boy Parts has so far sold 60,000 copies, she says: strong numbers for any literary debut, especially one from a tiny independent house such as north London’s Influx Press, which said yes to Clark’s cold pitch after she was snubbed by 12 agents. The book went more or less unreviewed – coming out in the plague summer of 2020 didn’t help – yet steadily amassed word-of-mouth buzz. About a year and a half after publication, Clark began to notice an extra digit on her royalty cheques. “It was TikTok. I don’t use it, so I had no idea. One of my friends said, it’s everywhere, there are videos about it that have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views.”

Taking aim at our relationship with true crime, the brutality of teenage girls and classicism, it was easily my favourite read of 2023 so far.' @charlotte__reads_ Alongside the crime focus is a detail BP: One aspect of the book I really liked was just how unreliable you made your narrator. The whole thing is basically framed as a work of unethical and biased reporting, which is something you get a lot of with true-crime podcasts. It’s funny that for a genre so focused on investigation and going over every detail, rarely is the lens ever turned on the person writing. Clark’s flagged the drawn-out death of American teen Shanda Sharer as a key inspiration but there are distinctive echoes too of the kind of commercial crime fiction devoured by teenage girls – like Carlene Thompson’s In the Event of my Death which revolves around the aftermath of a similar murder. But, like David Peace in his “Red Riding Trilogy,” Clark seems to be using Joni’s murder and its Yorkshire setting, fictional seaside town Crow-on-Sea, to construct an oblique commentary on fault lines in British society particularly those that crisscross the long-neglected North. Joni’s death takes place on the night of the Brexit referendum, highlighted by making one of the killers, Angelica, the daughter of a UKIP politician eager to see his Brexit dreams fulfilled. Like the many actual seaside towns so significant to pro-Brexit campaigns, the predominantly-white Crow-on-Sea is in the throes of inexorable decline. In a county infamous for high levels of violent crime it’s overshadowed by a cabal of right-wing men, a miniature cesspit of small-scale corruption and exploitation: Angelica’s father shamelessly trades on his relative wealth and local clout; he boasts about his former connection to disgraced celebrity Vance Diamond a serial paedophile once active in the area and a ringer for real-life Jimmy Saville; and another of the killers Dorothy or Dolly Hart seems likely to have been sexually abused by her father, a former Yorkshire police officer.All in all, Penance is a compulsive and unsettling examination of the morality of true-crime and how true-crime cases are treated and discussed today, particularly in a post-truth world. I wasn't even able to finish Eliza Clark's debut, Boy Parts, so color me surprised when my interest was piqued when her sophomore novel hit NetGalley. Here's an example of when I'm glad to have given an author another chance. This book isn't perfect by any means, I'll discuss that in a bit, but it's leaps and bounds better than her debut, in my opinion. plus, i was Very Much on the ~dark side~ of tumblr* throughout the 2010s (*defo NOT serial killer tumblr) and i'm so interested in reading about this microcosm of old gen z/young millennial adolescence, so that being so central to the narrative was so exciting to me! At around 4:30 a.m., on 23 June 2016, sixteen year old Joan Wilson was doused in petrol and set on fire after enduring several hours of torture in a small beach chalet. Her assailants were three other teenage girls - all four girls attended the same high school."

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment