'A woman has a baby and she can’t stop crying. She cries not just on the third day after giving birth with the “baby blues”, but as she feeds him, as she takes congratulatory cards from the letterbox, as she watches television and opens a tin of tomatoes and tries to explain her confusion to a GP. The percussion of new motherhood hits hard, though she finds, to her surprise, that she’s good at the practicalities, and she has no difficulty in loving her child. She panics whenever the baby cries, envisions catastrophe as she strolls with the pram. There are nightmares prowling in her snatches of sleep: her dog drowning, fires, a twilight with two moons and planetary apocalypse impending. The ordinary assault to normality of parenting a first child is bad enough but, she wonders, “was this all that this was? Me acclimatising to reality? I doubted it. I had a history of reality turning irretrievably bad.”' (Introduction)
'In Mark Brandi’s new novel The Rip, a homeless, young, female drug addict says to the reader: “I don’t think I could ever make you understand what it’s like for me, unless you could be me for a minute.” Of course, this is precisely the kind of sympathetic identification the novel encourages. It invites the reader to witness this character’s life for the duration of its story, using first-person point of view and a direct form of address that cleverly intensifies the illusion of conspiratorial intimacy.' (Introduction)
