What You Could Have Won

'Exuberant, limber, sexy, incandescent, frenetic, addictive.' Joanna Walsh----'Every page hums with incisive detail, black wit and hard truth.' Sara Baume----'Sensuous, fraught-languorous, and wholly compelling: Genn's novel is a triumph of wit, stylish prose and observation. I loved it.' Eley Williams----'Genn brings light to the darker sides of love, writing with sensitivity and empathy about fame, desire and resilience. Intricately plotted and delicately written, What You Could Have Won is subtle, yet sharp.' Juliet Jacques----'Spectacular, dizzying, utterly addictive: regret, desire, hopeless love, searing wit. As one protagonist says: "a good story is a good story because it makes you its own". Genn's novel completely claimed me.' Helen Mort----'How can I write something that does justice to the unexpected turns, the dazzling intricacies, the humour and the heartbreak and the poetic description of this novel? I can't - I'd better ask Rachel Genn to do it for me.' Andrew McMillan----'Rachel Genn takes up her tender knife again, to lay open the complexities of a relationship entangled in both public and private power. What You Could Have Won is a fiery, irresistible trip through music, drugs and personal agency.' M John Harrison----'Imagine William Gibson and M John Harrison had been commissioned to collaborate on a novel about sex, drugs, rock & roll and The Sopranos.' Nicholas Royle----Praise for The Cure ----'Startlingly tender.' Time Out----'Genn's narrative voice proves unusually nimble in its ironic, sympathetic shifts between the players in this compact saga. The Cure yields a surprising tensile strength for such a slim volume.' The Herald (Scotland)----'I loved The Cure. Rachel Genn offers a new and convincing take on the experience of the Irish migrant worker, evoking in exhilarating dialogue the multi-ethnic Babel of contemporary London. This is a story of family secrets, fierce male friendships and slow-burning love.' Joe Treasure----'The Geiger counter of Rachel Genn's prose moves over her characters' souls with forensic precision, detecting the minute shifts and vacillations that take place below the level of consciousness - those very things that make us human.' Katharine Towers, Seamus Heaney Centre prize-winning poet