2005 Governor General's Literary Awards Finalist!
$17.95 CDN | $14.95 US    178 pgs
Buy online: Amazon | Coach House


Golda will participate
in the 13th Annual
Will Read for Food (+ Art)

Thurs, Nov 15, 2008
5:30 p.m. - 9 p.m.
Weatherspoon Art Museum
Greensboro, NC

Admission is free, with a suggested donation of $5 for students and $10 for the general public to the Greensboro Food Bank.

NEW:
• McGill News reviews Nellcott

Click here for more about the music of Nellcott

***Selected in Top 10 of 2005 by TimeOut Chicago and NOW (Toronto)!***


When she got in his tall bed and lay down it was so high that she felt like the princess and the pea only it was coins that were under the mattress. He let her spoon him but it was never the other way around. She was learning to rely on his smell. Up close, he always smelt like fresh laundry which overpowered the cigarette smell that hung in the air. When she looked down, his boots were poking out from under the sheets.

Alice Charles has just moved to Montreal to go to McGill University. She's never had a boyfriend and doesn't know how to do laundry. She joins the Film Society and hangs out in the library. She drifts away from boring Bethany, her best friend from high school, and starts to trail after Allegra, the caffeine-addicted, dish-throwing artist in the dorm room next to hers. And, most of all, she thinks about how she's still a virgin and how she'll never figure it all out.

And then she meets Nellcott Ragland, a 23-year-old who works at Basement Records and wears black eyeliner, and he asks her on a date.

Alice tries to hide out in the Film Society office. She spies on Nellcott at the record store. She gets advice from Walker, her filmmaking, womanizing friend from Toronto. But sooner or later her parents are going to visit and watch her cry. She won't admit it to them, but Nellcott has become her darling.




About Nellcott is My Darling:

'There's something captivating about Fried's prose that makes Alice and Nellcott's relationship feel like a slow-motion whirlpool. Writing in such short sentences and with such a fine eye for the minutiae of relationships, she circles around emotional pivot points until the reader feels dragged into the depths of her characters, unaware of how he got there.'
-- Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago (Click here for full review)

'When shy, virginal Alice tells her friend Walker about the crush she has on a guy in her children's lit class, he advises her to get some sexy underwear. So Alice sits down in her tiny dorm room and cuts the bows off the 10 pairs of cotton panties that her mom bought her in bulk. It's funny because it's true. For anyone who was ever a raw, vulnerable, clueless teenager, it's even hilarious. Golda Fried has a knack for capturing the awkwardness of youth, and Nellcott is My Darling is full of painfully accurate scenes like this.'
-- Wendy Banks, The Globe and Mail

'Nellcott is My Darling has the heartbreaking lightness of a Yo La Tengo song. Also the sweetness, the melancholy, and the bracing jabs of astringent wit.'
-- Peter Trachtenberg, author of 7 Tattoos



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