Hannah is an intelligent, articulate woman in her late thirties who knows perfectly well that alcohol is destroying her career and her health, messing up her relations with her family, and generally sabotaging her life. But the “real life” she gets to experience during the periods when she’s sober just doesn’t seem to have enough to offer to persuade her that it’s worth sacrificing whatever it is alcohol does for her.

A painful, but often grimly funny, book that doesn’t take any prisoners. As someone else said here “horrible in a totally amazing way” (to put it another way: very Scottish). I didn’t much enjoy reading it, and I doubt whether it really adds anything tangible to an outsider’s view of alcohol addiction, but it certainly has some fine writing in it. ( )

This book was horrible in a totally amazing way. Engrossing, felt entirely realistic. Yet describing a nightmarish existence of addiction that was painful to read, but impossible to look away from. I don't know how accurate this is to life, and after reading this book, I am very grateful to not know that. ( )

I found this pretty heavy going with some lighter moments. It's a pretty grim read on the whole, and certainly an unromanticised view of alcoholism and what it can do to your life and sanity. I think it's well written, just not in a style I particularly got on with. ( )

Geweldige schrijfster, maar wat een naargeestig boek. Je zit de hoofdpersoon, een alcoholiste, dicht op de huid. Hierdoor wordt je samen met haar wakker en herinner je je bij flarden de vorige dag en de situatie waarin je je bevind. Genadeloos, dit portret. Heel knap gedaan, maar het ligt wel erg zwaar op de maag. ( )

"Paradise" by A. L. Kennedy had a profound effect on me in many ways. This is a somewhat difficult review to write because of my personal familiarity with alcoholism.

First of all I want to say that the writing is beautiful, poetic, original, sad, haunting, disturbing, and at times extremely funny. Kennedy will knock you down with such beautiful and devastating sentences as “If we were years ago and other people. If God allowed just anything.”

The depiction of alcoholism is real, honest, and brutal:

“I am delicate and the world is impossibly wrong, is unthinkable and I am not forewarned, forearmed, equipped. I cannot manage. If there was something useful I could do, I would – but there isn’t. So I drink.

So I drank.

And on all those other evenings, drink has trotted in and softened worries, charmed away internal repetitions of unpleasant facts and lifted my attitude those few vital degrees which prevent everybody from dragging their past behind them like a corpse, while bolting forward through a suicidal haze.”

I have felt this exactly but could not express it as accurately as Kennedy does here. She is unclean, uncomfortable, doesn’t understand, suicidal. And she compares this to how she was when she was a little girl, clean, happy, untainted, with her brother and parents, when there was love, health, beauty, and a future.

I normally do not give a book five stars. There have only been a few. But this one well deserves it. The writing is just phenomenal. I don’t know why this book is not as well known as Henry Miller’s "Tropic of Cancer". It is that good. It also reminds me a little of "The White Hotel" by D. M. Thomas, especially the surreal nightmarish train ride at the end with all of the sexual undertones – a train ride itself is a sexual innuendo, hills being the mounds of flesh, trees being pubic hairs, the train slicing through...

I almost didn’t mention this next part but I feel I should because it is important to me. The book also had a physical effect on me, I guess because I so strongly identified with it. I don’t drink coffee. I hate the taste. Always have. But in one scene, on the train, she is in a bar and the bartender gives her coffee and it is the best coffee she has ever had and with each new mug it tastes even better. That night I dreamed I made myself coffee and I remember tasting it and enjoying how good it tasted. I actually remember, can feel, the taste. This next part is extremely strange. In one point of the book she is walking with her father. She accidentally steps on a board with a nail and the nail punctures her foot. The next morning I woke up with a huge bruise on the bottom of my right foot. Fortunately it wasn’t cut but there was, and still is, a huge bruise. I have no memory of stepping on anything. I don’t know what this means. I should probably talk to a therapist about it… But as you can see, the book did have multiple effects on me.

It is a dangerous book to someone like myself; like looking in a mirror and seeing the real horror of life reflected back at me. Beautiful, astonishing, mad horror. ( )