Olivia Sudjic – författare

An electrifying debut novel of obsessive love, family secrets, and the dangers of living our lives online 

THE DEBUT OF 2017THAT EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT FROM ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING YOUNG BRITISH NOVELISTS'A gripping odyssey into one woman's online-addled inner life' -- Independent'Reads likeThe Talented Mr Ripley for the 21st century' --Vice UKAt twenty-three, AliceHare arrives in New York looking for a place to call home. Instead she finds Mizuko Himura, an intriguing Japanese writer, who she begins to follow online,fixated from afar and increasingly convinced this stranger's life holds a mirror to her own. But as Alice closes in on her 'internet twin', fictional and real lives begin to blur, leaving a tangle of lies, blood ties and sexual encounters that cannot be erased.

'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 CHOICECHOSEN AS A 2021 BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR BY OBSERVER, INDEPENDENT, FINANCIAL TIMES, EVENING STANDARD, GRAZIA, STYLIST, ELLE THE NATIONAL, FIVE BOOKS AND BUROA 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?

''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 CHOICECHOSEN AS A 2021 BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR BY OBSERVER, INDEPENDENT, FINANCIAL TIMES, EVENING STANDARD, GRAZIA, STYLIST, ELLE THE NATIONAL, FIVE BOOKS AND BUROA 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?

''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 CHOICECHOSEN AS A 2021 BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR BY OBSERVER, INDEPENDENT, FINANCIAL TIMES, EVENING STANDARD, GRAZIA, STYLIST, ELLE THE NATIONAL, FIVE BOOKS AND BUROA 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.