After graduating with an English Literature degree and taking on a Communications job, Sophie's Edit focuses on her love for literature and film, good food, pop culture and her love for Scotland. It's the latest in a string of literary fiction pieces that I've read that feel aspirational to that title. New York breeds unhappiness and problems, and in that sense, it makes you fit into a mould that truly, only some people are made for. Mellors also does not have the ability to make her insufferable characters compelling like Moshfegh.

The book is oddly racist at times, casually throws out slurs for the razzle dazzle factor, and approaches heavy topics [ sexual assault + attempting to end ones life ] only to shock the reader and not fully engage in those dynamics to the level they should be in a book like this. Twenty-four-year-old British painter Cleo has escaped from England to New York and is still finding her place in the sleepless city when, a few months before her student visa ends, she meets Frank. so i am absolutely baffled by the hype the book is receiving and the continuous comprison of the authors. You have to be willing to go on a journey that doesn't necessarily leave our protagonists shining and shimmering in the end.

And then she was running toward the lights, and the door was flinging open with a taxi still moving and Frank was stumbling out toward her, and she catapulted herself into his arms, and his lips were pressing hot and quick against her face, her ears, her hair, because it was a miracle, against all the odds he had found her here on this dark patch of road, and now everything else was forgotten, forgiven, all that mattered was that he was here, holding her close against his familiar chest, and she knew what it was to be a miracle”. cleo is in her early twenties, a beautiful and troubled artist from england whose expiring student visa means she’s living on borrowed time in new york city. along with being a tender and painfully realistic character study, the book provides explorations of love, marriage, desire, friendship, art, addiction, and mental illness.

i don't mind self-important nor self-indulgent novels but they need to actually bring something to the 'literary' table.Yes, Mellors’ novel was an instant success, branded ‘hottest book of the year’ by Stylist and an instant Sunday Times Bestseller, which makes it hard to believe that this is in fact her first published novel. He offers her the chance to be happy, the freedom to paint, and the opportunity to apply for a green card. A tender, devastating and funny exploration of love and friendship and the yearning for self-evisceration. the book perfectly captures the messiness and complexities of relationships in the modern world, especially what happens when the honeymoon phase starts to wear off and reality sets in. Needless to say, they are not: Wayward Cleo flexes with the fact that her husband pays, Frank lives his life like he's collecting stories he can tell at drug-fuelled parties (which should also show that this is clearly not an effort in the vein of Sally Rooney, the politics are fundamentally different and here, feminism mainly features as a rhetorical gimmick).