Eternity Is Temporary | Granta

  • Published: 12/04/2007
  • ISBN: 9781846270369
  • 130x20mm
  • 272 pages

Eternity Is Temporary

Bill Broady

This is for anyone who sweated their way through the summer of ’76, as well as readers of Jonathan’s Coe’s The Rotters’ Club, Martin Amis’s Success and Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden. It’s the long, hot summer of 1976 and Adrea is falling in love for the first time, while nursing the decrepit residents of Heron Close, a care home in Chalk Farm. This is the summer that sees Blue Oyster Cult and Supertramp superseded by Patti Smith and the Stranglers, and as the heat rises in and out of the Roundhouse, the lives of Heron Close’s residents and carers alike are about to blister and burn. And right in the midst of all this humdrum squalor, like the sun’s rays beating back the darkness, are Adrea and Evan, about to let in the light and heat – with inflammatory results.

Broady makes the inside of your head feel a way it's never felt before

Douglas Coupland

Piquant characters are Bill Broady's strength and Eternity Is Temporary is thronged with eccentrics and grotesques ... Pin-sharp and enjoyable

Independent on Sunday

As intensely felt as it is intensely urban, this is the first British novel really to explore the psychological crease that seemed to accompany the opening tremors of punk in the UK

Michael Bracewell

The Author

Bill Broady is the author of the novella Swimmer (Flamingo, 2000) and In This Block There Lives a Slag (Flamingo, 2001) which won the 2002 Macmillan Silver Pen Award for short stories.

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