Gold

Starred review from March 26, 2012
Cleave (Little Bee) goes for the gold and brings it home in his thrillingly written and emotionally rewarding novel about the world of professional cycling. Zoe Castle and Kate Meadows met at age 19 trying out for the British Cycling Team and have been friends and rivals for 13 years now. Kate might have more natural ability, but Zoe is the more driven of the two. Kate is married to a fellow racer, Jack Argall, and they have an eight-year-old daughter, Sophie, who suffers from leukemia. Zoe is pursued by her own demons and has a tabloid reputation for sleeping around, which doesn’t sit well with her agent. Things begin to heat up when the International Olympic Committee changes its rules so that only one cyclist, either Zoe or Kate, will be eligible to compete in the 2012 London Games. Cleave expertly cycles through the characters’ tangled past and present, charting their ever-shifting dynamic as ultra-competitive Zoe and Kate are forced to decide whether winning means more to them than friendship, building to a winner-take-all race at the Manchester Velodrome. Cleave likewise pulls out all the stops getting inside the hearts and minds of his engagingly complex characters. The race scenes have true visceral intensity, leaving the reader feeling as breathless as a cyclist. From start to finish, this is a truly Olympic-level literary achievement. Agent: Jennifer Joel, ICM.

August 27, 2012
In Cleave's novel, best friends and cyclists Kate and Zoe go head to head while representing Great Britain in the London Olympics. Zoe, who has won gold before, competes with the sense that life holds nothing for her save the thrill of competition and victory, while Kateâwho missed previous Olympics while caring for her ill childâsees the competition as her last chance to prove herself. Emilia Fox's winning narration is clipped and clear, and stands in direct contrast to the unique voices she creates for the fiery Zoe and the slightly insecure Kate. Fox also produces a believable Australian accent for the athletes' grizzly coach and playful cadences for Kate's Scottish husband Jack. In all, this is an outstanding audio production, in which the performance serves the story and even enhances it. A Simon & Schuster hardcover.

Through masterful manipulation of pace and volume, narrator Emilia Fox heightens the drama of this story about Kate and Zoe, British bike racers facing their last Olympic Games. Fox's voice gives listeners a sense of the women's competitive spirit and physical pain as, strapped to their bikes, they speed around the steep banks of the velodrome, pushing themselves just to the point of passing out. After their decades of training together, Kate and Zoe's lives are as entangled out of the arena as in, adding dimension to the novel. Although Fox lowers her pitch for the male voices, she is not at her best rendering their Australian and Scots accents. Also, the use of sound effects to signal several phone conversations is unnecessary and distracting. Happily, Fox's portrayal of the two protagonists shines. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine