Love Me

Singer-poet Gemma Weekes turns to prose with a dazzling first novel about love: true and false. Set between London and New York during one hot, sticky summer, ILove Me/I tracks Eden's obsession with lyricist Zed, achingly cool and, to Eden, the most beautiful boy she's ever met. Paralysed by lust, Eden hangs out at Zed's gigs, squeezes into mini-dresses and drops as many hints as a girl can without losing her dignity, but with no result. Zed's more interested in Coco, aka 'The Blonde' Essex girl extraordinaire, 'white as toothpaste'. But is Coco the real reason these two can't get it together? As the story unfolds, glimpses of their St Lucian relatives and parents reveal that Eden and Zed have some serious history they need to escape if they're ever to understand what real love is. Gemma Weekes has a way with language that puts all the sweat, colour and raw emotion of a city night directly on to the page. Her dialogue fizzes with the spoken word, her characters are deliciously real. From chubby 'brer' Dwayne to kind aunt K and sexy Spanish, who smoulders with Black Pride, from Hackney to Brooklyn, Weekes brings to life a world of cross-cultural relationships, passion and pain that zings with life and reveals her to be a major new talent.