Glover's Mistake
Cloth, Penguin, $25.95
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Wednesday, July 22nd: Nick Laird

Nick Laird was born in Northern Ireland in 1975 and studied at Cambridge University and Harvard. He is the author of two collections of poetry and the acclaimed novel Utterly Monkey. He currently teaches creative writing at Columbia University in New York. He is married to the writer Zadie Smith.

From the Viking/Penguin press release: In stylish, economical, often hilarious prose, Glover's Mistake examines the corrosive power of jealousy through the prism of an unusual threesome: David Pinner, a thirty-something college teacher who harbors a snide, cynical side laid bare in the journal-cum-blog he calls The Damp Review; his flatmate James Glover, younger and cooler, who at 23 works in a bar as he tries to decide what to do with his new adulthood; and Ruth Marks, the attractive, very successful American artist, once David's professor, now as legendary for her groundbreaking artwork as for her three divorces and popularly agreed-upon sex appeal. When David and Ruth meet by chance ten years after leaving the classroom, David immediately becomes enamored; but when he introduces Ruth to James, it is they who begin an affair.

The love triangle that ensues makes for a wonderful comedy of manners. Laird writes with a wry, sympathetic ear on the nature of friendships, romantic relationships, vanity, envy, and the inherent messiness of human life. His backdrop of the London art scene, awash with new money and intellectual pretension, adds an additional layer to this dry, satirical, confident novel.

Listen to an interview with the author...