Product Description
No feeling reader could fail to fall for Blair Nevin, the heroine of this explosive novel. Blair is a 23-year-old, combustible, reluctant-student lawyer in Dublin whose considerable powers of effort, creativity and enterprise are devoted entirely to the hunting of men. She's a magnificent creation. "My parents imagined that I was in Dublin studying those portions of Irish law a British law degree had not covered with a view to accepting articles from a man called Nigel at a firm of solicitors who were, like both myself and him, secret Protestants, but this was quite false." Meet Blair Nevin, reluctant student lawyer. Well, why would a girl like her, so clever, so charming, so brilliant, want to waste time in such a pursuit. Blair is 23, she is downright lovely, and there are men to fall in love with. All she has to do is convince them their lives will not be worth living without her. First there is evil, beautiful Richard to contend with. Richard, who will insist on finding his thesis on C.S. Parnell of greater importance than the lovely princess in his bed. How to entrap this elegant creature? But then there is also Patrick, sordid married Patrick -- how is she to resist his nasty lure? This is the dating game as you have never seen it before. Indeed, this is the world as you have never quite seen it -- through the eyes of the utterly unpredictable, self-contradictory Blair. Altan Walker, in her first novel, has created the most unforgettable of heroines: feisty, foul-mouthed and fierce, a mass of inexplicable urges and desires, Blair is a magnificent creation, and Walker effortlessly elevates her pursuit of love to truly mythical heights. Written in the most wonderful Irish-English language, with a lacerating wit that extends beyond Blair's male prey to include the English, the Tories ('I would have sex with an ape first, I thought: I would strike off my right hand, I thought, before I could couch with a Tory.'), both the Catholics and the Protestants of Ireland, lawyers, and Blair herself, Of Earthly Love is an exquisitely engineered satire on politics, love and law, with a subtext as subversive, wicked and ingenious as anything Swift or Pope ever wrote.
About the Author
Altan Walker was born in Northern Ireland and studied law at Cambridge. She has lived subsequently in Brussels, Dublin and London.
