A Very Nice Girl: A Novel

by Imogen Crimp Narrated by Olivia Forrest

Overview

"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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Featured in USA Today's "Can't-Miss Reads"

"Imogen Crimp's enjoyable debut novel . . . is an all-too-real reminder of what it is to be a woman in your 20s, searching for who you are, trying on identities or stuck in a complicated pseudo-relationship even when you know you shouldn’t be. It’s a book about assessing your worth through other people’s eyes—parents, friends, a lover—and about being observed: by an overprotective mother, by men on the tube, by those who assess her auditions, by classmates competing for her slot, and ultimately by the audience."
—The New York Times

"With some steamy sex scenes in the mix, Crimp feels like she’s channeling something of the Sally Rooney style: interior and complex, but also unafraid to incorporate corporeal forces among all the others that govern us. This is high-class romance at its best."
—Vogue

"Crimp triumphs . . . An intoxicatingly powerful read that will become your latest obsession."
—Tatler (UK)

"Absorbing and gripping . . . Like Raven Leilani's Luster, Naoise Dolan's Exciting Times, or Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends."
—The Guardian

"A Rooney-esque exploration of power and class in young women's relationships, heightened by its brilliant opera-world setting."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A blazing, darkly funny debut that captures a young woman's search to find herself both through love and performing opera—and the way one fights to cancel out the other. It has an honesty and tenderness that will stay with me for a long time."
—Rachel Joyce, New York Times bestselling author of Miss Benson's Beetle and The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

"Transfixing from the start, A Very Nice Girl steals the show. Gorgeous prose, bone-dry humor and brutally shrewd observations make Imogen Crimp’s debut sing in this perilous love story about a talented young woman learning to wield her voice. Intimate and intoxicating, A Very Nice Girl absolutely dazzles."
—Beck Dorey-Stein, New York Times bestselling author of From the Corner of the Oval

"Crimp, a trained opera singer, offers absorbing, rich prose that brings dramatic scenes to life and illuminates delicate manipulations in a controlling relationship."
—Booklist

"In A Very Nice Girl, Imogen Crimp explores complicated relationships, the creative life, and the challenges of living in London in your twenties, with precision and subtlety. Touching on feminism, power, finances, and the pleasures and dangers of a new relationship, this book is an assured debut."
—Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground

"An exquisitely detailed novel—Crimp absolutely nails the intricate inner workings of the opera world. Humorous, biting, and unnervingly honest, the story explores one young woman’s path to finding herself."
—Addie Woolridge, author of The Checklist

"Imogen Crimp captures the glittering thrill of being young and choosing your own life with a dark, unflinching undercurrent of desire, power and control."
—Jessica Andrews, author of Saltwater

Library Journal

09/01/2021

Aspiring opera singer Anna studies at an elite London conservatory by day and supports herself by singing jazz at a ritzy bar by night, finding relief from the stress in her budding relationship with cool, wealthy, just-divorcing financier Max. Soon, though, she is caught between him and her career. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2021-11-30
An aspiring soprano is thrown off course by a tempestuous affair with a wealthy, mysterious older man.

To support herself as she studies on scholarship at a prestigious conservatory in London, hardworking, anxious Anna works as a jazz singer in the hotel nightclub where her uninhibited, popular best friend, Laurie, an aspiring writer, is a waitress. At first the women live in a hovel run by live-in landlords who measure the level of their bathwater and spy on them relentlessly; later they move into an “experiment in communal feminist living” where dinner topics include whether pornography is inherently misogynistic and why straight White men don't care about climate change. As the book opens, Anna meets an older customer named Max, whose teasing, hard-to-read response to her charms gets hooks into her fast. Crimp’s enthralling debut plunges forward from that night, Anna's confession tumbling out as if on waves of breath, dialogue recounted without quotation marks adding to the effect. At first, she is able to balance her fixation on Max, who is both exceedingly generous and frustratingly withholding, with her commitment to her voice (“the voice,” as this crowd thinks of it). She adores her mentor, Angela, a well-known soprano who is preparing her with the utmost rigor for the demands of a cutthroat profession. A big break comes when the woman who is singing Manon gets laryngitis on closing night and Anna, her understudy, gets to show what she can do. In several wonderful passages, Crimp takes us inside Anna’s head as she performs, singing her way through the emotional trail markers of the libretto—inevitably suggesting certain resonances with her own affair. As Anna summarizes the classical opera plot: “He did x to me. He did y to me. I never got over it.” Did he, though? Cleverly, Crimp never pins down exactly what Max did and what Anna projected; you can read things two ways right through the end.

A Rooney-esque exploration of power and class in young women's relationships, heightened by its brilliant opera-world setting.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176375411
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	02/08/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

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