Two timelines intertwine: a mother and her young daughter Kate living in a seaside caravan, and Amy and Ash, two girls whose intense friendship begins in a small Scottish town. Ali Smith's debut novel circles loss, desire and the missing person at the heart of both stories.
Books mentioned in Like (10)
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams: Epigraph: 'What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.' Tennessee Williams (epigraph)
Not Marble by Edwin Morgan: Epigraph: 'Exegi this, exegi that ... Hordes, posterities, judges vainly cram the space my love and I left yesterday.' Edwin Morgan (epigraph; poem identified in the acknowledgements as 'Not Marble')
A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy: “'An aged-looking Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (I'd read it already ...)'”
Clarissa by Samuel Richardson: “'anything to put off reading Clarissa, I've got an essay for tomorrow ... it's all about rape'”
Gunga Din by Rudyard Kipling: “'I called out poems I'd learned at school. Gunga Din, the Burns poem about the mountain daisy.'”
To a Mountain Daisy by Robert Burns: “'Gunga Din, the Burns poem about the mountain daisy'”
The Solitary Reaper by William Wordsworth: “'After that I understood what all the Wordsworth stuff was about. The Solitary Reaper'”
The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley: “'announced the beginnings of novels, the past is a foreign country, she called, they do things differently there'”
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes: “'books I knew she particularly liked. Hiroshima Mon Amour, A Lover's Discourse' (thrown on a fire)”
Northern Antiquities by Paul-Henri Mallet: “'The ash is the greatest and best of all trees ... (Malet's Northern Antiquities)' in a quoted dictionary entry”