Use the Words you Have
Kimberly Campanello
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From the publisher
‘I love what this novel does with language... I love its glimpse of the possibility that a young girl’s first
experience of sex could be tender and hot. Read it like you’d eat a melting ice cream.’ — Daisy Hildyard
‘I wonder if you’ve had a love like this? If there was a love you had one day long ago, a love that you tell stories about. Do you have the words to write it?’
A striking debut novel and literary romance like no other, Kimberly Campanello’s Use The Words You Have unfurls over a long, hot Breton summer as American student K’s love affair with an older local ignites her self-actualisation as a woman and a writer.
Barred from speaking English by their French Honours programme, the other American students’ identities flicker and fade from the estrangement. Yet for K, who immerses herself deeper into her exchange family’s life, this dissolution makes way for a profound transformation.
Heady and poetic, erotic and intelligent, Use The Words You Have is an unmissable coming-of-age story, rich in Breton cuisine and culture, French poetry and Italian-American rituals. Campanello’s debut presents a singular world and an utterly original new voice in literary fiction.
‘A moving meditation on the capacity of language and love to shape us… saturated in sun and salt water, drenched in heat and longing.’ —Jessica Andrews, author of Milk Teeth
‘Eroticism here is as much about discovering another’s body as it is about discovering the body through language. It’s Rimbaud, it’s Hélène Cixous, even a touch of Claudia Durastanti. But Campanello is entirely her own here.’—Jason Allen-Paisant, author of The Possibility of Tenderness
‘It’s been a complete pleasure to read this… The restraint, clarity and precision of the writing is faultless.’—Joanna Walsh, author of Worlds from the Word’s End
‘Composed in a delicate, aching space between nostalgia and desire, between the past and eternity, Use the Words You Have shimmers like light on a sea recollected across decades.’—Rob Doyle, author of Here Are the Young Men