A Very Nice Girl, Imogen Crimp
A Very Nice Girl, Imogen Crimp
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.89
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A Very Nice Girl
A Novel

Author: Imogen Crimp

Narrator: Olivia Forrest

Unabridged: 11 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/08/2022


Synopsis

"Tender, devastating, witty. And deeply true. Sweetbitter meets Normal People.”
—Meg Mason, author of Sorrow and Bliss

For readers of Sweetbitter and Luster, a razor-sharp debut novel about an ambitious young opera singer caught between devotion to her craft and an all-consuming affair with an older man

Anna knows she has talent, but she’s always felt out of place in the world of opera. A first-year student at a prestigious London conservatoire, she lives in a grim series of rented rooms with her friend Laurie, a sharp-tongued waitress and aspiring writer. Her days are devoted to highly competitive auditions and long, straining rehearsals. At night, she sings jazz in an expensive bar, relying on her popularity with the inebriated businessmen to make rent and stay afloat alongside her wealthy peers.

It’s there that Anna meets Max, a charismatic financier in the midst of a divorce who, at thirty-eight, is fourteen years Anna’s senior. Reluctantly impressed by Max—his stillness, his careful detachment—Anna soon finds herself desperate to hold his attention. As winter pervades the city, Anna begins a dangerous oscillation between hard-won moments on stage, where she can zip herself into the skin of her characters, and nightly stays at Max’s glass-walled flat. But as Anna’s fledgling career begins to demand her undivided attention, so too does Max, a situation that dangerously compounds until Anna must decide who—or what—she wants.

Intoxicatingly propulsive and written with lacerating precision, Imogen Crimp’s A Very Nice Girl is a clever, sexually charged portrait of a young woman on the teetering edge of adulthood. With heartrending authenticity and an arresting voice, it lays bare how we consciously shape our identities in the pursuit of power, desire, and a place to belong.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company.

About Imogen Crimp

Imogen Crimp’s debut novel A Very Nice Girl was shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize, selected for Malala Yousafzai’s Fearless Book Club and chosen as a book of the year by the Sunday Times and Grazia. She lives in London.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Meike

This was a weird one: I can't deny that I enjoyed listening to the audiobook, but frankly, this isn't a particularly smart or nuanced work. Our unreliable narrator is 25-year-old Anna, a rural working-class kid who comes to the big city to study opera. She enters an affair with Max, a 40-ish London......more

Goodreads review by leah

a very nice girl follows anna, a 24-year old who’s training to be an opera singer at a prestigious conservatory in london. while working at a hotel bar to support her studies, she meets max, an older financier who is handsome, mysterious, cold, and also in the midst of a divorce. anna is unsure wha......more

literally NOTHING happened but i enjoyed it. love me some 'sad girl in her twenties' book 🥰......more

Goodreads review by Emily

And yet, my bleeding heart. This one is tough. It’s dense. It’s solid on which to chew. A Very Nice Girl is the story of love and loss, but mostly of the in between. The hard lines. The muddied median. The toughest meat. It is what every small, infinitesimal rejection shrouded in silent phones and e......more

Goodreads review by Nicole

DNF at 30%. The book dragged so much. Perhaps it was the wordy language, or the boring storyline. I had high hopes for this one. Unfortunately it was not for me. It’s the story of Anna, an insecure girl who doesn’t fit it. She desperately tries to please her wealthy older boyfriend, despite all the r......more


Awards

  • Vogue Magazine Best Books of the Year