Cleaner

Dark, strange, and gripping, Shannon’s debut revolves around the unnamed narrator’s obsession with cleaning. For the 20-something woman, an aspiring painter and art school graduate saddled with “an ungodly amount of student debt,” cleaning had long been a “nuisance.” But now, back living in a small English town with her parents, she becomes compulsive about tidying, starting in her parents’ house, where she grows attuned to “the art of each movement” and feels “light-limbed and coiled with energy” from simple tasks such as emptying a cupboard. After getting a job as a cleaner at an art gallery, she stumbles upon fellow aspiring artist Isabella doing coke in the bathroom and the two hook up. They get caught having sex by the owner, and the narrator loses her job. She urges the flighty Isabella to tell her live-in boyfriend, Paul, that she has been hired to clean their home, and after Isabella inexplicably disappears one day, the narrator assumes her place as Paul’s companion. Shannon’s writing is delightfully weird and witty as she tracks her narrator’s metamorphosis “from a daytime creature into a night-time hag” who spends her days sleeping, her evenings with Paul, and her nights in Isabella’s studio. It’s a memorably off-kilter portrait of a woman’s search for meaning. Agent: Helen Edwards, Helen Edwards Rights Agency. (Feb.)