Soft Core
A wildly funny, hallucinogenic and stylish novel following a young woman on a quest for friendship, love and selfhood in San Francisco’s seedy underground
A blazing novel following a young woman on a hallucinogenic quest for love and selfhood in San Francisco’s seedy underground.
Baby is a dancer at a strip club and other than that she’s feeling a little lost. It seems that only Dino, her sweet, cross-dressing, drug-dealing ex-boyfriend can keep her afloat. So, when Dino disappears without so much as a kiss goodbye, she plunges headfirst into San Francisco’s shady erotic underground to find him.
Baby searches through dive bars and old haunts, at the club and at the sex dungeon where she has a part-time dominatrix gig. She encounters clients like Simon, a recluse paying her for increasingly bizarre “favours” and a philosophizing suicide fetishist named ‘Nobody’, as well as coworkers like Emeline, the balletic new hire who seems to want to steal Baby’s whole identity, starting with her underwear.
But soon Baby starts to find cryptic notes hidden in her bag and slipped into her locker at the club. The clock is ticking: will Baby manage to put together the pieces and find the only man she’s ever loved? Or might her past catch up with her first?
Manically smart, brutally funny and deeply sexy, Soft Core is a book about desire, fantasy, and true love – like no other.
Praise for Oola: -
'Newell nails the lure, intoxication, and fallout of obsessive love (and its subsequent madness) that somehow seems a mandatory requirement of growing up' Elle -
'Stunning … compelling … the experience of reading Oola is one which will leave the reader pondering questions about love, desire, and possession long after the last page has been turned' NYLON -
'Electrifying' Harper’s Bazaar -
'[Oola] takes a major twist, from love story to something decidedly more interesting and experimental' Refinery29 -
'Original, astute … Newell’s insight, intelligence, and prose are all clearly prodigious … subtle and outrageous, wonderfully readable yet philosophically challenging' Electric Literature -
'Oola is so good' New York Observer -
'[Oola is a] twisted debut, testing the boundaries between love, obsession, and identity … Newell’s rangy, circuitous tale is a kind of queer Nadja for millennials with a self-satirizing—and satisfying—bite. A dreamy and provocative exploration of sex, privilege, and self-discovery' Kirkus -
'Her searching high beams on privilege’s victims and beneficiaries, the fluidity of gender, the lonely writer’s life, and love’s desire to possess reflect Newell’s obvious talent for observation and care with words' Booklist -
'A gloriously labyrinthine love story, packing major verve and form … The prose is satisfyingly rich and thick, and often left me thunderstruck. It strikes that perfect literary balance between articulacy and mystery. I can’t tell you how many sentences I re-read. It’s the kind of book you want to linger in and never leave; the kind of book that DOES things to you … Poetic, inspiring, just wow. Brittany Newell is truly one to watch! … In short: I adored it' Emma Jane Unsworth, author of Animals -