Swiss Kissing

Synopsis

A debut novel about the single moment that infects a life.

On New Year’s Eve 1976, in a Swiss hotel disco, ten-year-old Poppy meets nine-year-old Dan. They dance, share a Coke, slip out into a games-room cupboard and kiss. He goes home to Manchester, then Dublin. She goes home to Sloane Square, to a politician father, an absent mother and a sister losing herself faster than anyone notices. Decades later, addressing the letter to Dan she never sent, Poppy looks back at the moment everything turned: the New Year a year on when her father called her, in front of the children, a whore. From punk London to 1980s New York, drama school, anorexia, near-suicide and the long climb back, this is a debut about the single sentence that shapes a life.

Praise for This Book

‘Like the stories of Lorrie Moore, or the writings of Lucia Berlin, the deep truths Yasmine Lever’s book contains about addiction, about psychic entanglement, about longing, and love, and paralysis, and fear, are delivered with such deftness and lightness of touch that they catch you completely off-guard. I adore this novel – I’m envious of anyone getting to read it for the first time.’ —Lucy Caldwell