Cleopatra and Frankenstein

Cleo is twenty-four, a gifted British painter who has fled England for New York and is running out of time on her student visa. Frank is a successful advertising executive twenty years her senior, magnetic and generous and drinking more than he should. They meet on New Year's Eve, fall hard and fast, and within six months they are married — a decision that solves some problems and creates many more.

As their marriage unfolds, the novel widens to take in the people orbiting them: Cleo's fiercely devoted best friend Quentin, Frank's needy younger sister Zoe, and a chorus of lovers, colleagues, and hangers-on in globalized New York. Beneath the couple's glamour and chemistry run darker currents — alcoholism, depression, infidelity, and grief neither of them has reckoned with, including the suicide of Cleo's mother and Frank's own fraught childhood.

Coco Mellors's debut is a witty, aching, ensemble portrait of a love affair and its fallout — a story about addiction and mental illness, the friends who carry us, and the messy business of becoming yourself.