A kind of intimacy - Jenn Ashworth

Annie is morbidly obese, lonely and hopeful. She narrates her own increasingly bizarre attempts to ingratiate herself with her new neighbors, to learn from past mistakes and achieve a 'certain kind of intimacy' with the boy next door. Undeterred by her target's hostile girlfriend, she searches for guidance, obsessively studying self-help literature and romance novels. Though Annie struggles to repress a murky history of violence, secrets and sexual mishaps her past is never too far behind her, finally shattering her denial in a compelling a bloody climax. "A Kind of Intimacy" traces the dark possibilities of best intentions going awry and gives an unsettling glimpse into a clumsy young woman who has too much in common with the rest of us to be written off as a monster. Annie moves into her new home bringing little else but her cat and a collection of cow-shaped milk jugs. She's hoping for a clean slate, but there's something familiar about the next-door neighbor - she's convince she's seen him somewhere before.

Jenn Ashworth was born in 1982 in Preston.
She studied English at Cambridge and Creative Writing at Manchester.
She is now Head Librarian in a prison.
Her first novel went missing with a stolen computer, but an extract from it won the Cambridge University Quiller-Couch Prize for Creative Writing in 2003.
In 2006 an extract from A Kind of Intimacy, her second novel, won second prize in a national competition:
The Enigma of Personality.
She is also the recipient of the Manchester Literary Festival Best Writing on a Blog 2008.

'An intense and intriguing novel that never quite lets the reader get comfortable.
It understands about the fuzzy boundary between the normal and the strange, and weaves them together in a gripping, ever-darkening narrative' Jenny Diski