World Literature, Fiction Subjects, Peoples & Cultures - Fiction

Leave Before You Go

Name: Leave Before You Go
Author: Emily Perkins
ISBN: 9780765593979

by Emily Perkins

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Overview

Leave Before You Go is about Daniel, an average guy whose determination to escape the daily grind of London drives him to risk his life. Lured by a free trip and the promise of ten thousand dollars, Daniel boards a plane to pick up a "delivery" for an acquaintance. Shortly after his plane lands, he finds himself trafficking heroin from Thailand, penniless, and paranoid on the other side of the world.

Daniel's misadventures as a drug smuggler leads him into the netherworld of grungy hostels and casinos in New Zealand, where he wins—and loses—a fortune in one night. Reduced to petty thievery, he must beg, borrow, and steal in order to live from hand to mouth. His desperate searches for shelter and employment steer him in many directions, all of which seem to lead directly to Kate.

Kate works as a disgruntled usher in a cinema in Auckland, constantly drifting in the shadow of her more successful sister, Nina. As she wrestles with what to do with her life, she contends with some not-so-latent feelings for her ex-boyfriend, Frank. When Daniel arrives unexpectedly to stay with her best friends, Lucy and Josh, Kate suspects that she has seen him somewhere before. Wasn't he the stranger she caught sneaking into the cinema? Or was he the one she'd noticed shoplifting at the bookstore? Only when Daniel moves into her ex-boyfriend's empty apartment does Kate begin to piece together some of the coincidences that have brought them together.

With humor and insight, Leave Before You Go charts the seeming randomness of relationships in early adulthood. When Daniel's and Kate's worlds collide, their relationship offers a witty portrait of a new kind of lostgeneration.

Author Biography: Emily Perkins was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, and grew up in Auckland and Wellington. Her first book, Not Her Real Name, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Fiction and was short-listed for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Twentysomething angst over the opposite sex, career malaise and anxiety regarding overall life direction unite three young New Zealand natives and a mysterious English stranger in Perkins's dry-humored first novel (her collection of stories, Not Her Real Name, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Fiction in Great Britain). Eager to leave London, art school dropout Daniel agrees to help a friend of a friend by trafficking heroin from Thailand to New Zealand. His inexperience and stupidity soon conspire against him and he resorts to two dangerous strategies--lying and stealing--to scrape by. Professional drifter Kate hates her latest job as an usher at an Auckland movie theater. She doesn't much care either for her aging hippie mother, Ginny, or her glamorous young sister, Nina, whose constant ego-puffing compels her to scheme vindictively against Kate and others who prefer not to worship at her self-erected shrine. Kate manages to find some solace with best friend Lucy, a social worker who seems happy with live-in lover Josh until he takes in a starving, desperate Daniel and gives him whatever he needs--money, food, a friend's empty apartment. It seems only natural that lonely and in limbo Daniel and Kate should meet. Perkins's fresh and clever narrative is propelled by effects like the zinging, one-liner dialogue between Kate and Lucy, and the Jaws music (dum dum dum dum) that follows Nina everywhere she goes. Picturing the travails and triumphs of her sexy cast on variously beckoning backdrops of sea, sky and home, Perkins crafts a sophisticated and compelling tale. (May) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Kirkus Reviews

If the world needs another Bret Easton Ellis, New Zealand author Perkins could be a contender. Her debut novel, populated with disgruntled twentysomethings like those in her story collection, Not Her Real Name (not reviewed), promises sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, but after an exciting start delivers mostly ennui. Daniel is an unemployed young Londoner going nowhere when his friend Richard and an unsavory character named Sticksy sucker him into making a drug run from Bangkok to Auckland. It isn't the lure of beer, beach, and Thai virgins that makes Daniel jump at the offer, but the idea of adventure and the $10,000 he hopes will give him the chance to make a new start. A few weeks later, confined to his room and the murky pool at a tacky Pattaya resort, he's rethinking his rash decision as his anxiety intensifies along with his sunburn and stomach ills, but he's afraid to do anything except wait for his instructions. By the time Daniel's contact shows up with the heroin-filled condoms he's to ingest and smuggle through customs, the tension is deliciously unbearable. Perkins skillfully sets up Daniel's dilemma and maintains the pace right through his arrival in New Zealand. But then she shifts to the travails of a group of local slackers, zeroing in on Kate, an underachiever who works as an usher in a movie theater. The action shifts back and forth from Daniel to Kate until, inevitably, the two meet but never really connect, the depths of their alienation painfully apparent. While Perkins effectively captures the mood and mores of her subjects, once Daniel's mission is complete, the anguish of youth takes center stage and the story goes flat.Youngpeople lacking ambition, confused about relationships and searching for the meaning of life: what else is new?