Sex and the city
Coco Mellors’s lively, involving debut novel begins on New Year’s Eve in New York, with Cleo and Frank meeting in a descending elevator. It’s a sure sign that their future relationship will not end well. Cleo is British, young, golden and an artist; Frank is American and old (well, he’s in his late thirties), and he has taken the devil’s dollar by working in advertising. Cleopatra and Frankenstein deals primarily with the indistinct boundaries between commerce and art, set against a backdrop of neurotic New Yorkers, glitter, drugs and booze. As Frank walks Cleo home through streets full of hedonists, swapping one liners and teasing each other, they fall in love (or at least, into a clinch on the stairs of her dingy apartment).
