If ever there was a book for our uncaring, unsharing times, it is Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, in which Neve, a woman in her mid-thirties, struggles with a truly awful family and with the men in her life, while trying to make a career as a writer. That latter point might suggest some kind of
bildungsroman approach, but in fact the meat of First Love is in its rich character depictions, from which Riley teases out a series of painful but exquisitely comedic episodes.