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Lionel Shriver

Wednesday 13th May 2020

Venue
St Peter's Church, Broad Street, Ely, Cambridgeshire CB7 4BB
Doors Open
7.10pm
Start Time
7.30pm
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The stubbornness of an ageing man in Lycra is not to be underestimated

From the Orange Prize-winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin comes the story of an obsession, of a marriage, of a betrayal. Lionel Shriver at her hilarious, sharp-eyed, audacious best.

Allergic to group activities of any kind, all her life Serenata has run, swum, and cycled – on her lonesome. But now that she’s hit 60, all that physical activity has destroyed her knees. As she contemplates surgery with dread, her previously sedentary husband Remington, recently and ignominiously redundant, chooses this precise moment to discover exercise.

Which should be good for his health, right? Yet as he joins the cult of fitness that seems increasingly to consume the whole of the Western world, her once-modest husband burgeons into an unbearable narcissist. Ignoring all his other obligations in the service of extreme sport, he engages a saucy, taunting personal trainer named Bambi, who treats his wife with contempt. When Remington announces his intention to compete in a legendarily gruelling triathlon, MettleMan, Serenata is sure he’s going to end up injured or dead.

Lionel Shriver’s novels include Sunday Times bestsellers Big Brother and The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World and The Orange Prize-winning international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin. Her journalism has appeared in the Guardian and the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and many other publications. She lives in London and Brooklyn.