A compact tour de force about sex, violence, and self-loathing from a ferociously talented new voice in fiction.
Composed almost exclusively of conversations between women, the stories they tell each other, and the stories they tell themselves, about shame and love, infidelity and self-sabotage, Topics of Conversation careens through twenty years in the life of an unnamed narrator hungry for experience and bent on upending her life. Touching upon desire, disgust, motherhood, loneliness, art, pain, feminism, anger, envy, and guilt; written in language that sizzles with intelligence and eroticism, this novel introduces an audacious and immensely gifted new novelist.
A book that repeatedly asks how women can fully trust their own desires when they’ve grown up steeped in the wrong stories ~ Karen Russell, author of Orange World
A pleasingly unsentimental novel about attraction and repulsion and the fluid line between the two ~ Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation