I found this book really hard to get into. The writing style is not my favourite, it's very rarefied, stream of consciousness, word association and no quote marks in the dialogue whatsoever. I don't think that is a bad style of writing per se, but I personally don't enjoy it. I actually contemplated not finishing it until I hit the 10% mark which is more or less when the character of Gabe is introduced. That might genuinely be too late for some people who might have already decided to DNF from feeling no connection to the main character.
I think the current political and economic situation where everyone is struggling to pay their rent and their bills and not many can afford to do what they really want to in life perhaps isn't the best time for this kind of storyline to come out and it's normal to feel some hostility towards it.

Hmmm. I think I may have missed the point of this book since I didn't really think it unsettling at all.

The story follows Dylan, an English woman, who decides to give up her job in advertising and sub-let her flat as an AirBnB while she goes to flat/cat sit for another woman but still in New York. She doesn't tell her friends or her boyfriend (who lives on the west coast) what she's done. Her plan is to write the novel she's been contemplating for a while. However once she's moved in she meets Gabe and Kate, her downstairs neighbours and begins an affair with Gabe.

So the writing is good and it's a mainly easy read but, for me, it wasn't particularly original. It's just a finding oneself sort of thing with an inadvisable affair thrown in. Dylan doesn't appear to do any writing and the main action appears to be the weather and her affair with a man who is clearly no stranger to playing away from home. Of course Dylan misreads Gabe's actions a lot but then don't we all want something to mean as much to the other person as it does to us?

At one point Dylan returns to England for a funeral but even there she doesn't really seem to do a lot. She does find some things out about herself during this "sabbatical" from ordinary life but otherwise its a messy sort of novel that goes in circles more than forwards.

If you like a messy girl novel then you'll probably enjoy it. As I said, the writing is good and this wouldn't put me off reading more by Miranda Pountney.

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House for the advance review copy.

'This is right up your alley,' a friend excitedly told me when I started reading Miranda Pountney's 'How to Be Somebody Else'. And for the most part she was right - I am a devotee of wistful literature in which chic women suffer quietly and this novel is exactly the kind of thing I'd usually be into. I loved the first sections - Pountney's protagonist Dylan hates her job, wonders through the park and watches everyone around her, seemingly a side character in her own life. She has everything a young professional working in the city could want: a perfect, sensitive boyfriend, a job that pays her to do seemingly very little and a British accent which situates her in a superior position to the kinds of academic, intellectual people that populate her life and buy into that sort of snobbery. But she's lost, and uncomfortable and itching for mischief, which arrives in the form of a downstairs-neighbour romantically entangled with someone else. And 'How to Be Somebody Else'.

Pountney knows exactly how to write young people rubbing up against each other - the best parts of this novel are the uncomfortable conversations Dylan has with the people around her. There's a fantastic dinner party scene, so thrilling in its nastiness it made me sit up in bed. The novel also shines when Dylan returns to the UK and must confront the mess of her American life from a distance. Here, Pountney gets right that the people that populate your life ultimately make it what it is.

It is difficult not to compare Pountney to that other Famous New Author who specialises in the specifric brand of melodrama with which Pountney seems to be interested. And of course to describe 'How to Be Somebody Else' as Rooney-esue may be cliche and reductive but Rooney is famously the Patron Saint of Modern Emotional Repression, and indeed you would be forgiven for confusing, at times, this novel with Rooney's 'Conversations with Friends' - both protagonists enter into clandestine relationships with married men and both employ the metaphor of motherhood and reproductive difficulty for some kind of emotional release. These sections wherein Dylan becomes preoccupied with her lover and the complications he presents are the less successful parts of the novel. I found the scenes with Dylan's spiky, hilarious friends and the difficulty with her career to be the more interesting dynamic of the novel, but they were mostly sidelined for what may be a borderline psychotic leading man. The story is sexy, but there are far more interesting things happening outside of the bubble Dylan creates with her man. Maybe that's the point.

The dialogue is fun and stunning, and the protagonist compels. There is certainly a beating heart at the center of this strange, beguiling novel. I just wish it beat a little harder.

At the start of this novel, Dylan – the female protagonist – gives up her successful job at an advertising agency in New York, promptly lets out her flat and, all too easily, finds an alternative owned by an artist who is in need of a cat sitter for a couple of months. She imagines herself doing some writing, but she doesn’t tell any of this to her boyfriend, Matt, who is working on the West Coast.

The couple downstairs in the new place are called Kate and Gabe and things soon start happening with Gabe, Dylan has some indeterminate meetings with her friends and simply drifts around while imagining aspects of life with Gabe, postponing her problems with Matt and finding it difficult to talk honestly to anyone. Eventually everything goes wrong but she survives!

It is not much of a story but is carried along by the sharpness of the writing style and the observations of New York, Gabe and Kate. It’s often very funny, often rude and unflinching. It sometimes reads like a written up version of someone’s journal, disjointed impressions linked together. This impression is added to by the sense that Dylan is constantly constructing herself, thinking about whom she might be or might become, in spite of events which suggest something different. That’s the link to the title!

It’s a good read and even if you don’t know much about the culture and geography of New York the observation and the description carries it along. The ending is a bit too easy, almost lazy and you wouldn’t know by the end whether you have just followed Dylan’s journey to self-discovery, or just been party to another episode along the way in a confused life. Having said that, I enjoyed it!

Interesting book about an affair between Dylan and Gabe. Dylan has just left her job at a NY advertising agency in order to reinvent herself.

She flatsits in order to look after someone’s cat but then takes on the persona of the owner. She meets her neighbour Gabe on the fire escape and starts an affair, at odds with Gabe’s wife and her boyfriend.

It is interestingly written, somewhat a stream of consciousness, as Dylan battles in her head over what she thinks and wants. Her uncertainty comes to a head when her boyfriend returns from the west coast and she falls pregnant.

I love a British literary/contemporary fiction, and this was a good debut. I love finding new authors and Miranda is definitely one I'll pick up again.

Sadly quite disappointing. Maybe it was just me, but I found the narrative incredibly confusing, and I wasn’t drawn into Dylan’s story. A real shame.