Jennifer McCartney

I'm a Canadian novelist and short story writer from Ancaster, Ontario. My fiction has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and appeared in various online and literary journals in the UK and USA.I have lived and worked in Ohio, Michigan, Utah, South Carolina, New York, London and Glasgow, where I received a graduate degree in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow.My first novel AFLOAT is published in the UK, Canada and the Commonwealth by Penguin UK/Hamish Hamilton:
Mackinac Island is on the Great Lakes in the American Midwest. Just nine miles round it has golf courses, expensive restaurants, no cars and plenty of rich people.And for one summer it’s got Bell, a student employed to serve the wealthy. Bell and her fellow waiters and waitresses sample the delights of this earthly paradise: expensive yachts, alcohol, horse-drawn carriages; and they can’t help but come to know each other intimately.But this knowledge comes at a price. For they have each carried with them secrets from the outside world that will not be left behind …
‘ A suspenseful and thoughtful read … By turns funny and ominous … As with the best current dystopian writing (Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go come to mind), McCartney's Afloat stays rooted in the real, the daily details, the human side of political and environmental inevitability. When Bell says, of her daughter, “All that living, all those places visited, the pins on the map and still – her skin and insides so vulnerable to pain,” she might as well be talking about herself, or any of us. Often insightful, never sentimental, Jennifer McCartney's Afloat is a smart, contemporary debut well worth reading.’
--Sally Elizabeth Cooper, Globe and Mail, Canada, March 2007
‘McCartney keeps the reader pleasurably engrossed, as eager as Bell to discover what really happened on Mackinac that summer. The most powerfully evoked tragedy, however, is a temporal one. The memories Bell cherishes from her youth are not things that actually happened but of “the possibilities ahead of me.” A youth spent envisioning a future that, as Fitzgerald put it, “year by year recedes before us”. Now relatively wealthy, living in the “right part of town”, she devotes her time to an endless replaying of the past. Bell's inability to live comfortably within the present is poignant; it lends the humour and riotous drunkenness throughout this novel a disquieting, sombre edge.’
--Helen Gordon, Times Literary Supplement, 9 March 2007
‘So fascinating that by the end, when the pace of narrative speeds up to produce a denouement, I felt almost resentful. As Bell dreads her time on the island coming to an end, so did I … [Afloat is] a novel that has several layers of tone; the story is sometimes horrifying, sometimes hilarious, but always overlaid with a sense of poignancy.’
--Kirstie McLuckie, Scotsman, 3 March 2007
‘Afloat has a clean, distinct quality to the prose (a precision, if you will) that brings to mind (to my mind at least) another Canadian writer, Margaret Atwood’
--Peter Wild, www.bookmunch.co.uk, March 2007
‘A delicious, sexy, energising read that pulls you headlong into a vodka-fuelled party with the seriousness of adulthood on the fringes . . . Beautifully written.’
--Dianne Redpath, www.literaryagent.co.uk, February 2007
‘This is a deeply moving and evocative debut from a young Canadian novelist with an extremely rosy future. Afloat is the story of Bell, who spends a drunken tourist season on Mackinac Island on Lake Michigan forming relationships which echo through the years in this daring yet tenderly-wrought depiction of the confusion of young love.’
--Doug Johnstone, Big Issue, February 2007
‘Fresh, energetic and genuine . . . reminiscent of The Time Traveller’s Wife’
--Suzanne Black, The List, February 2007
‘An appealing debut . . . successfully portraying the eroticism of young love’
--Lesley McDowell, Scottish Review of Books, February 2007
‘An intriguing tale of summer love told in teasing retrospect . . . lovingly evoked, the more so for McCartney's sly humour and the mood-perfect banter’
--Laurence Wareing, Herald, February 2007
‘Afloat contains some of the most evocative writing I’ve read all year … the prose is clearly defined and etched with care . . . Beautiful language which she lets breathe and swell, invoking much more than what first appears on the page’
--Craig Taylor, Quill & Quire, Canada, January 2007
‘For such a young writer, McCartney has an astonishingly mature talent. Her precise, ambitious prose reads with soaring effortlessness. Afloat is an exhilarating debut, a bracing, sassy novel with a hugely poignant core.’
--Zoe Strachan
‘Lively, sexy, often hilarious and ultimately touching—here’s a debut that manages to be both idyllic and dystopian, a book peopled with layered, likeable characters whose dialogue is fresh, whose insights are sharp, and whose story stays with you.’
--Steven Heighton [author of Afterlands]
UK enquiries:
Jayde Lynch Penguin General Publicity Tel: 020 7010 3368 [email protected]
Canadian enquiries:
Melissa Robson, Publicist Penguin Group Canada Tel: (416) 928-2405 Email: [email protected]
For rights enquiries or commissions:
Euan Thorneycroft A.M.Heath and Company Ltd. 6 Warwick Court London WC1R 5DJ T: 020 7242 2811 F: 020 7242 2711 www.amheath.com