Output details

Cold Light

In dialogue with crime fiction from The Oresteia to Twin Peaks, one of Cold Light’s central research question concerns genre and technique: Is it possible to write a crime novel when the narrator did not witness any of the crimes? The novel uses an unreliable first person narrator, peripheral to the plot in order to explore the ways that communities make myth, the power and pitfalls of narrative itself, the sexualisation and un-sexualisation of young women, and the crime fiction genre. The novel also asks if the technical device of the chorus can be utilised in long form prose fiction. These explorations of individual and community culpability were informed by the author’s experience of work in a category B men’s prison. Another research question concerns the representation of place and wildness. Cold Light is set in a slightly-off kilter version of Preston in the late 1990s – the city that might have existed if other events in the novel really took place. Key scenes take place in municipal parks and nature reserves. The novel takes the controlled, clichéd wildness of adolescence and lays it against the controlled, fenced in wildness of council owned parks and green spaces.

Cold Light was published in 2011 in the UK by Sceptre books and 2012 in the US by William Morrow. Following publication, Ashworth was featured on the BBC’s Culture Show as one of the UK’s twelve best novelists and commissioned to write a piece for The Guardian. In 2012 she was invited to Istanbul to speak at the ITEF literature festival on the way young women are represented in fiction. The book was positively reviewed in The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, The Express, The Telegraph, Bella, Grazia magazine and others. In 2012 the book was also translated into German.