It’s 1956, a year after Lucy and Alice have left Bennington College in Vermont. They were roommates and close friends, despite their difference in backgrounds. Alice is a wealthy Brit, Lucy a poor Vermonter on scholarship. They share the trauma of having lost their parents, Lucy as a young girl, Alice more recently.
Mangan has been nomadic for much of her life. Originally from the metro Detroit area, she spent parts of her upbringing on Long Island and in North Carolina before heading to Bennington College — which her two main characters attend — for a year.
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Returning to the midwest to attend Columbia College Chicago for her bachelor’s, she then lived in Chicago while completing an MFA from the University of Southern Maine before heading to University College Dublin for her Ph.D.
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Vertical Divider
“Whatever symbiosis existed between us was real, tangible, and now, without her presence I could feel the absence of it, as if she were an extension of my own person. She was, I realized, that awful, wretched part of me that should be locked away and boarded up forever - like Jane's madwoman in the attic. She was the unfiltered version, the rawness that no one should ever see. She was every wicked thought, every forbidden desire turned real and visceral.”
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Hailed by the publisher as one of their most promising spring releases, the book, set in the Fifties between Bennington College in Vermont and the Moroccan city, has already been optioned by George Clooney’s production company Smokehouse Pictures, with Scarlett Johansson signed on to star.
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May 15, 2018
Book 2 - 'Absolute Friends' |