Second paragraph of third chapter:

He hadn’t known how much he’d been looking forward to seeing that girl, until they were suddenly together in the royal coach, and she froze him out. Things had been no better since. He was back where he’d started, with the stone cold eyes, the clipped chill voice, the so, do you want that fuck? In times like these, a lover isn’t for sex. A lover is someone to reach for in the night, someone whose existence in the world you can cling to when you’re hard pressed. He’d been imagining that was what they were for each other, but no way. She’d been living in Pig’s hotel under some kind of house arrest, which couldn’t have been fun. He’d thought she’d relax when he took her back to the Snake Eyes’ place: it hadn’t worked.

I read the first part of this when it first came out in Interzone, way back in the day, and thought I had read the rest since, but this was mostly new to me. I generally enjoyed it, which is a relief because I bounced off a couple of other books by Gwyneth Jones that I tried in the meantime. I also suspect that I would not have enjoyed it as much when it first came out; the disintegration of the United Kingdom's structure of government doesn't seem either as improbable or as unwelcome as it did in 2001. The setting is a near-future England where Scotland and Wales have become independent and Ireland has reunited, and the counterculture takes over the government so that senior political figures are also playing in their own bands, and if anything a bit better known for the latter than the former. Our heroine, Fiorinda, undergoes a gruesome sexual initiation in the first section of the book and one of the plot strands is her personal quest to come to terms with it; other strands involve the machinations of various factions, some more believable than others. It's a really impressive vision of what a future England could look like, even if it's now twenty years old; slightly dystopian but also with a tinge of optimism. You can get it here.

Bold as Love won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2001. I've read three of the other nominees, Mappa Mundi by Justina Robson, Pashazade by Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Passage by Connie Willis, and have yet to get to the other two, Fallen Dragon by Peter F. Hamilton and The Secret of Life by Paul McAuley. I really loved Pashazade and I think if I'd been a judge that year I'd have argued strongly for it. But I can see why the judges may have felt that Bold as Love was more directly addressing the Matter of Britain, or more precisely the Future of England, and therefore fits some concepts of what the Clarke Award is sometimes trying to do.

My last review was of that year's Tiptree winner, The Kappa Child, and next will be the BSFA winner, Chasm City (Bold As Love was also on the BSFA shortlist).