Book description
Sophie Hannah's sharp pen dissects modern life and relationships
with insouciant honesty and ruthless wit, and her love poems evoke
timeless feelings with a shrewd simplicity that deepens her range. An
edge of desolation, tenderness -- an occasional flash of cruelty --
and an ebullient delight in language make this a book of bittersweet
pleasures. Pessimism for Beginners includes an extract from the
opening chapter of Sophie Hannah's second psychological thriller,
Hurting Distance, published by Hodder & Stoughton, described by
the Times as 'a superbly creepy, twisty thriller about obsessive love,
psychological torture and the darkest chambers of the human heart'. In
poetry and prose, Sophie Hannah is compellingly readable.
Sophie Hannah was born in Manchester in 1971 and now lives in West
Yorkshire. She was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College,
Cambridge and a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. She has published
four previous collections of poetry with Carcanet, a book of poems for
children, and two psychological crime novels, Little Face in 2006 and
Hurting Distance in 2007, both with Hodder & Stoughton. Sophie has
won awards for her short stories and for her poetry. In June 2004 she
was chosen for the Next Generation poetry promotion as one of the best
twenty poets to emerge in the last ten years.
