Electricity

by Ray Robinson

Overview

Ray Robinson’s visceral, ambitious debut novel Electricity is a tour de force portrayal of a heroine you will not soon forget. Thirty-year-old Lily O’Connor lives with epilepsy, uncontrollable surges of electricity that leave her in a constant state of edginess. Prickly, up-front-honest and down-to-earth practical, Lily has learned to make do, to make the most of things, to look after — and out for — herself. Then her mother — whom Lily has not seen for years — dies, and Lily is drawn back into a world she thought she’d long since left behind. Reunited with her brother, a charismatic poker player, Lily pursues her own high-stakes gamble, leaving for London to track down her other, missing brother Mikey. In the pandemonium of the city, Lily’s seizures only intensify. As her journey takes her from her comfort zone, it leads her into the question of what her life is meant to be.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802170354
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	08/10/2007
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

Editorial Reviews

Thirty-year-old Lily O'Connor suffers from epilepsy. Abused as a child by her alcoholic mother, she grew up in foster care and is now working as a bingo caller in a dismal seaside town in northern England. After her mother dies, Lily is reunited with her brother Barry, a professional poker player known as Slick. Lily becomes obsessed with locating her other brother, Mikey, who was last seen operating a reptile house. Despite her frequent terrifying seizures, she sets off to London to search for Mikey. At first she is overwhelmed by the chaos of the huge city, but she is determined to start a new life. Along the way, she finds both betrayal and the hope of true friendship. First-time novelist Robinson has succeeded in writing a convincing story from a female perspective while giving us an edgy, gripping look at what it's like to live with epilepsy. Recommended.
—Leslie Patterson

Library Journal

A vividly portrayed, most unconventional protagonist dominates this punchy first novel from an award-winning British short-story writer. She's 30-year-old Lily O'Connor, a sufferer from temporal lobe epilepsy since early childhood, when her intemperate and unstable mother threw her down a flight of stairs. Lily tells her own story, which begins when her mother (from whom she was "taken away" following the aforementioned "accident") dies, and Lily leaves her entry-level job taking tickets at an amusement park arcade and heads for London, seeking her two brothers. She finds-but discovers she has nothing in common with-sleek, self-absorbed Barry, a professional card player interested in nothing beyond training himself for the World Poker Open. But Mikey, the brother she loved, who had gone missing years earlier, is still nowhere to be found. Adrift in London (which she envisions as "a pile of bodies writhing like fat worms in a fisherman's box"), Lily makes connections doomed to short-circuit: with Mel, the woman Cambridge grad and banker who takes her in (and undoubtedly loves Lily, secretly and guiltily); and with the cryptic Dave, a smug, secretive electrician (symbols clash here) who becomes her lover and abuser, echoing the pattern in which preadolescent Lily had been caught up with her mother's creepy boyfriend Don. The details of such relationships are cliched, and there's too much of the social worker's casebook in other's observations of Lily. But whenever we're inside her own thoughts and perceptions, the novel soars. Innovative typography helps: images of pills Lily takes, lined up in a row; skewed, distorted jumbles of letters, denoting her frequent convulsive seizures. AndLily's voice is impressive-raw, angry, emotionally urgent, rising frequently to inchoate poetry (e.g., water in a canal runs "oily and slow . . . . sound[s] like treacle glooping. Stench like burnt toast"). She's a survivor like no other, and the mixed pleasure of inhabiting her jagged psyche is the best reason for reading this daring tightrope-walk of a novel. Agent: Jennifer Carlson/Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency Inc.

Kirkus Reviews