The Glasgow launderette has been a sanctuary for Agnes, Myrna and Siobhan, binding them together in tentative, fragile friendships. But when all three are forced to make vital choices, their lives become caught in a spin which whirls events towards a shocking conclusion …
Spin Cycle is a deep, dark and dirty story of furtive desires – and their consequences.
Some more about the characters from the trade paperback:
Agnes, Siobhan and Myrna all work in their local launderette and, on the surface, have little in common apart from a passion for keeping themselves to themselves’ Agnes is fascinated by tales of true crime, and one crime in particular – the murder of her cousin Vina, a glamorous good time girl, found strangled outside a dancehall when Agnes was fifteen.
Myrna, meanwhile, lives for the evenings and weekends, longing for romance but craving for sex and money; with mounting debts, her decisions become fuelled by desperation, and she enters a shadowy night-time world fraught with danger.
Siobhan is perhaps the most elusive of the three, constantly retreating into her synaesthetic imagination, conjuring the details of people’s lives through their laundry – her fantasies becoming gradually more and more treacherous.
Despite their distance and their differences, isolation draws the women together, casual work relationships metamorphosing into tentative, fragile friendships. As all three are forced to make choices about their lives, and the launderette, events build towards a shocking conclusion. Blacker and more ambitious than Negative Space, Zoë Strachan’s vibrant second novel is illuminated by her light observational touch, deft characterization and gift for creating – and sustaining – suspense.
“Strachan follows her prize-winning first novel Negative Space with another well-observed and quietly forceful story about women in emotional turmoil . . . She makes us notice the everyday detail of their working lives, the minor tensions and the camaraderie, the idle chat and occasional pearls of wisdom, and introduces us to a parade of those strange people without washing machines who all get cameo parts while they’re waiting for the spin cycle to finish”
Independent on Sunday
“Spin Cycle has the noir sexiness of Dance With a Stranger: idiosyncratic individuals, gnarled by bitterness and covetous desire, moments of small embarrassment and mundane realism, the eventual breathless climax”
Uncut
Zoe Strachan |
