Marnie Walsh

Marnie Walsh is one of the novel’s main characters. The third person narrator also inhabits her consciousness throughout the novel and describes large swaths of the narrative according to her distinct point of view. In the narrative present, Marnie is 38 years old and living alone in her Herne Hill flat in London. She works as a copy-editor and proofreader and spends most of her time reading manuscripts from home by herself. Marnie used to be married to a man named Neil who she divorced “in her late twenties” but “[s]ince the divorce [there has] been no one, not really” (6). Time and circumstance have also caused her to lose her friends “to marriage and parenthood with partners she [does not] care for or who [do not] care for her, retreating to new, spacious, ordered lives in Hastings or Stevenage, Cardiff or York while she [fights] on...