Banks For The Memories

I don’t profess to know how prizes and awards are decided, or what the machinations are, but you certainly couldn’t accuse the folks behind the Orange Prize of not being up to speed. For lo! Aifric Campbell’s third offering, a timely novel set in the world of investment banking titled ON THE FLOOR (Serpent’s Tail), was officially published on March 1st, and here it is, on March 8th, already long-listed for the Orange Prize. Impressive, no?
  Anyway, Aifric is interviewed over in the Telegraph today, on International Women’s Day (hi, Mum!), speaking about what it’s like to be a woman operating in a male-dominated world. Quoth Aifric:

“I was always interested in writing about the City because it’s a closed world. But it took a long time because it’s difficult to make that world explainable to people outside it,” she said.
  “And I specifically wanted to write about women at work because I don’t think we read enough about that in fiction. If a woman is in a male-dominated world, what does she discover about herself?”

  Funnily enough, I was just thinking yesterday about the possibilities of a novel about an express parcel delivery dispatcher who takes a high-powered rifle and goes postal because she’s a woman in a mail-dominated world. Any takers?

The Killing Floor

Aifric Campbell’s two novels to date, THE SEMANTICS OF MURDER and THE LOSS ADJUSTOR, have offered intriguing variations on the conventional crime novel, and her latest, ON THE FLOOR (Serpent’s Tail), sounds as if it continues in a similar vein. Quoth the blurb elves:

In the City, everything has a price. What’s yours? At the age of twenty-eight, Dubliner Geri Molloy has put her troubled past behind her to become a major player at Steiner’s investment bank in London, earning $850k a year doing business with a reclusive hedge fund manager in Hong Kong who, in return for his patronage, likes to ask her about Kant and watch while she eats exotic Asian delicacies. For five years Geri has had it all, but in the months leading up to the outbreak of the Gulf War in 1991, her life starts to unravel. Abandoned by her corporate financier boyfriend, in the grip of a debilitating insomnia, and drinking far too much, Geri becomes entangled in a hostile takeover involving her boss, her client and her ex. With her career on the line as a consequence, and no one to turn to, she is close to losing it, in every sense. Taut and fast-paced, ON THE FLOOR is about making money and taking risks; it’s about getting away with it, and what happens when you’re no longer one step ahead; ultimately, though, it’s a reminder to never, ever underestimate the personal cost of success.

  An advance copy of ON THE FLOOR arrived at CAP Towers yesterday, sending the ARC-reading elves into a frenzy of anticipation which barely stopped short of the book itself being flittered. Looks like I’ll have to run a lottery, to see who gets the privilege of dipping into it first. And there was you thinking CAP Towers was all about hammocks, Cuban cigars and high-balls once the sun crawls over the yardarm …