# Cold Water

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/gwendoline-riley/cold-water/9780099437154

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![Cold Water](https://quivercdn.com/covers/vintage/gwendoline-riley/cold-water_978-00-9943-715-4.jpg?v=2026-04-22%2007%3A12%3A25)

- Book: [Cold Water](https://www.bookquiver.com/gwendoline-riley/cold-water) ([Cold Water.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/gwendoline-riley/cold-water.md))
- Authors: [Gwendoline Riley](https://www.bookquiver.com/gwendoline-riley)
- Publisher: Vintage
- ISBN: 978-00-9943-715-4
- Pages: 160
- Published: 2003-05-01
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

Carmel McKisco is wry, volatile and full of longing: a twenty-year-old girl working nights in a Manchester dive bar. Cut off from her family, and from Tony, her carefree ex, she forges strange alliances with her customers, and daydreams, half-heartedly, about escaping to Cornwall. Cold Water is a poignant picaresque of barmaids and barflies; eccentric individuals all somehow tethered to their past - not least Carmel herself, who is nurturing mordant fixations on both her lost love, Tony, and her washed-up adolescent hero: a singer from Macclesfield. As she spins out the days and nights of an unrelentingly rainy winter she finds herself compelled to confront her romantic preoccupations, for better or worse.