"Packed with tension, pathos, and vitality . . . This is a potent first novel from a formidable talent." -- Minneapolis Star Tribune "The best fictional account I've read of the way the internet has shaped our inner lives." -- Guardian (UK) At twenty-three Alice Hare, a loner, arrives in New York with only the vaguest of plans: to find a city to call home. Instead she discovers the online profile of a Japanese writer called Mizuko Himura, whose stories blur the line between autobiography and fiction. Alice becomes infatuated with Mizuko from afar, convinced this stranger's life holds a mirror to her own. Realities multiply as Alice closes in on her "internet twin," staging a chance encounter and inserting herself into his orbit. When Mizuko disappears, Alice is alone and adrift again. Tortured by her silence, Alice uses the only tool at her disposal, writing herself back into Mizuko's story, with disastrous consequences. "A smart and lyrical evocation of that murky emotional terrain between our online and offline selves." -- Vice (UK) "At once a riveting mystery and a literary tour de force, Sympathy had me spellbound from the first page to the last." -- Emily Gould, author of Friendship

An electrifying novel of blood ties, online identities, and our tormented efforts to connect in the digital age.

At 23, Alice Hare leaves England for New York - the city of her birth, before she was adopted by a British mother and an American father. She falls in love with Manhattan, and becomes fixated on Mizuko Himura, an intriguing Japanese writer whose life has strange parallels with her own.

As Alice closes in on her 'internet twin', realities multiply and fact and fiction begin to blur. The relationship between the two women exposes a dark tangle of lies and sexual encounters. Three families collide as Alice learns that the swiftest answer to an ancient question - where do we come from? - can now be found online.

Claimed as the first great Instagram novel, Sympathy is a razor sharp take on personal accountability, blood ties, and our tormented efforts to connect in the digital age.

'An eerily familiar reflection of our current moment ... It continues to haunt me' NATASHA BROWN, I PAPER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 'I will go wherever she takes me. A phenomenal book' DAISY JOHNSON 'A brilliant, scalding novel ... sharp, intricately layered, impossible to forget' MEGAN HUNTER 'Stunning ... beautifully written and deeply unsettling' BOOKSELLER, EDITOR'S CHOICE CHOSEN AS A 2021 BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR BY OBSERVER, INDEPENDENT, FINANCIAL TIMES, EVENING STANDARD, GRAZIA, STYLIST, ELLE THE NATIONAL, FIVE BOOKS AND BURO A couple drive from London to coastal Provence. Anya is preoccupied with what she feels is a relationship on the verge; unequal, precarious. Luke, reserved, stoic, gives away nothing. As the sun sets one evening, he proposes, and they return to London engaged. But planning a wedding does little to settle Anya's unease. As a child, she escaped from Sarajevo, and the idea of security is as alien now as it was then. When social convention forces Anya to return, she begins to change. The past she sought to contain for as long as she can remember resurfaces, and the hot summer builds to a startling climax. Lean, sly and unsettling, Asylum Road is about the many borders governing our lives: between men and women, assimilation and otherness, nations, families, order and chaos. What happens, and who do we become, when they break down?

A personal essay on exposure, auto-fiction, internet feminism and the anxiety epidemic. Last year Olivia Sudjic published Sympathy, a novel about surveillance and connection in the internet age. If a debut novel is written by a woman, it is often read and discussed as if it were a memoir. Suddenly Sudjic found herself shoved under the microscope, subject to same surveillance apparatus she had dissected in her novel. In this incisive personal essay, Olivia Sudjic draws on her experience to examine the damaging expectations that attend any young female artist, as well the strategies by which they might be evaded.

Living alone in New York, Frannie teaches creative writing to a motley bunch of students, and secretly compiles a dictionary of street slang: virginia, n., vagina; snapper, n., vagina; brasole, n., vagina. One evening at a bar, she stumbles upon a man, his face in shadow, a tattoon on his wrist, a woman kneeling between his legs. A week later a detective shows up at her door. The woman's body has been discovered in the park across the street. Soon Frannie is propelled into a sexual liaison that tests the limits of her safety and desires, as she begins a terrifying descent into the dark places that reside deep within her.