Asylum Road

Olivia Sudjic is a writer living in London. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Paris Review, Granta, Frieze, Financial Times, Guardian, Vogue and Wired. She is the author of Exposure, a personal essay, and Sympathy, her debut novel, which was a finalist for the Salerno European Book Award, the Collyer Bristow Prize and has been translated into five languages.

'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?

The taut, knife-sharp, compulsive second novel by the critically-acclaimed author Olivia Sudjic, 'a writer with an unerring instinct for asking timely questions' (Observer)

High-profile admirers of Olivia Sudjic's work include Jia Tolentino, Claire Louise-Bennett, Sophie Mackintosh, Matthew D'Ancona, Dolly Alderton and Pandora Sykes, Sinead Gleeson and Megan Hunter