Chris Cleave - Gold: A Novel

WHAT WOULD YOU SACRIFICE FOR THE PEOPLE YOU LOVE?

KATE AND ZOE met at nineteen when they both made the cut for the national training program in track cyclinga sport that demands intense focus, blinding exertion, and unwavering commitment. They are built to exploit the barest physical and psychological edge over equally skilled rivals, all of whom are fighting for the last one tenth of a second that separates triumph from despair.

Now at thirty-two, the women are facing their last and biggest race: the 2012 Olympics. Each wants desperately to win gold, and each has more than a medal to lose.

Kate is the more naturally gifted, but the demands of her life have a tendency to slow her down. Her eight-year-old daughter Sophie dreams of the Death Star and of battling alongside the Rebels as evil white blood cells ravage her personal galaxyshe is fighting a recurrence of the leukemia that nearly killed her three years ago. Sophie doesnt want to stand in the way of her mums Olympic dreams, but each day the dark forces of the universe seem to be massing against her.

Devoted and self-sacrificing Kate knows her daughter is fragile, but at the height of her last frenzied months of training, might she be blind to the most terrible prognosis?

Intense, aloof Zoe has always hovered on the periphery of real human companionship, and her compulsive need to win at any cost has more than once threatened her friendship with Kateand her own sanity. Will she allow her obsession, and the advantage she has over a harried, anguished mother, to sever the bond they have shared for more than a decade?

Echoing the adrenaline-fueled rush of a race around the Velodrome track, Gold is a triumph of superbly paced, heart-in-throat storytelling. With great humanity and glorious prose, Chris Cleave examines the values that lie at the heart of our most intimate relationships, and the choices we make when lives are at stake and everything is on the line.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR GOLD BY #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR

CHRIS CLEAVE

Cleave goes for the gold and brings it home in his thrillingly written and emotionally rewarding novel.... [He] 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 breathless.... From start to finish, this is a truly Olympic-level literary achievement.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY * STARRED REVIEW

After the enormous popular success of his second novel, Little Bee, Cleave turns to the world of Olympic speed cyclists to explore the shifting sands of ambition, loyalty and love.... [Kates] little girl Sophie is the novels real heart. Cleave has a gift for portraying difficult children who pull every heartstring... he knows how to captivate.

KIRKUS REVIEWS * STARRED REVIEW

EXPERIENCE CHRIS CLEAVES INCENDIARY AND LITTLE BEE

STUNNING.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

BRILLIANT... A HAUNTING WORK OF ART.

NEWSWEEK

LITTLE BEE WILL BLOW YOU AWAY.

THE WASHINGTON POST

HEARTWARMING AND HEARTBREAKING.

THE BOSTON GLOBE

LOU ABERCROMBIE

CHRIS CLEAVE is the author of Incendiary and the #1 New York Times bestseller Little Bee . He lives with his wife and three children in Kingston-upon-Thames, England.

Visit www.chriscleave.com

or follow him on Twitter @chriscleave

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COPYRIGHT 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

Also by Chris Cleave

Little Bee

Incendiary

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2012 by Chris Cleave

Originally published in Great Britain in 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition July 2012

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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Designed by Ruth Lee-Mui

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cleave, Chris.
Gold: a novel / Chris Cleave.1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PR6103.L43G65 2012
823'.92dc23
2011043699

ISBN 978-1-4516-7272-5
ISBN 978-1-4516-7274-9 (ebook)

For Cecily

Just on the other side of an unpainted metal door, five thousand men, women, and children were chanting her name. Zoe Castle didnt like it as much as shed thought she would. She was twenty-four years old and she sat where her coach told her to sit, beside him, on a thin white bench with the blue protective film still on it.

Dont touch the door, he said. Its alarmed.

It was just the two of them in the tiny subterranean changing room. The walls were freshly plastered, and little hardened curds of the stuff lay on the cement floor where theyd fallen from the trowel. Zoe kicked at one. It came detached, skittered away, and dinged against the metal door.