An Experiment in Leisure

'I adore this book! ... An Experiment in Leisure shows us the burning, intense, messy beauty of youth and what it means to be alive' Maxine Peake

'Can I get a refund?' I asked the bus driver.
'You taking the piss, love?'

It's January 2015, and Grace is supposed to have what she wants. She's swapped West Yorkshire for north London, her accent carefully edited and with a Cambridge degree under her belt. Her friends drink beer out of artful tins. She makes flat whites for people with berets. She's found a psychoanalyst.

But this fantasy of metropolitan cool is turning out to be more costly than she thought, and Grace is running out of credit. Painfully adrift from her mother and twin sister and trying desperately both to forget her roots and disown her ambition, she's lost and confused in the face of complicated crises of identity, class, sex and geography. She finds herself fleeing up and down a country on the verge of an intractable schism, and begins to reckon with her own divisions. Can she find a life amid these contradictions? Can she remember how to love?

'A dizzying yet powerful read' Claire-Louise Bennett

Anna Glendenning is a writer from Leeds. She was formerly an editor at And Other Stories, where books under her wing made the 2018 Man Booker International and Goldsmiths Prize shortlists. In 2017 she was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize. She was born in 1991, is based in London and works in the engagement team at Kew Gardens.