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Looker

On sale

25th July 2019

Price: £10.99

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Selected: Paperback / ISBN-13: 9781472258809

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‘Dazzlingly creepy storytelling, reminiscent of NOTES ON A SCANDAL’ Grazia

‘A short, bracing shock of a novel, easily gulped down in one sitting’ Metro

‘Written with a precise, sinister elegance, this is a gripping portrait of one woman’s descent into madness’ Heat

The Professor lives in Brooklyn; her partner Nathan left her when she couldn’t have a baby. All she has now is her dead-end teaching job, her ramshackle apartment, and Nathan’s old moggy, Cat. Who she doesn’t even like.

The Actress lives a few doors down. She’s famous and beautiful, with auburn hair, perfect skin, a lovely smile. She’s got children – a baby, even. And a husband who seems to adore her. She leaves her windows open, even at night.

There’s no harm, the Professor thinks, in looking in through the illuminated glass at that shiny, happy family, fantasizing about them, drawing ever closer to the actress herself. Or is there?

‘Unsettling and compelling’ Tammy Cohen

‘Laura Sims has pulled off the high-wire act of making bitterness delicious’ Vogue

Reviews

Leni Zumas, author of RED CLOCKS
With an agile precision reminiscent of Lydia Davis, Laura Sims captures the obsessiveness of a woman who unravels after the collapse of her marriage. A taut, gripping portrait, all the more sinister for its elegance
Peter Straub, author of A Dark Matter and Interior Darkness
This intense, gripping first novel from Laura Sims shoehorns us into a gathering disquiet and sense of dread, heightened at every turn by our sympathetic understanding of her relentlessly unraveling protagonist. The precise, observant writing slips through the skin without ever calling attention to itself
Publishers Weekly, starred review
Jealousy rears its ugly head in Sims's chilling and riveting debut. In this tightly plotted novel, Sims takes the reader fully into the mind of a woman becoming increasingly unhinged, and turns her emotionally fraught journey into a provocative tale about the dangers of coveting what belongs to another
Booklist
A dark and stylish drama featuring a self-aware yet unstable narrator
Greer Hendricks, co-author of THE WIFE BETWEEN US
Sims's debut is a breathless and unrelenting portrait of one woman's unraveling
Tammy Cohen
Unsettling and compelling
Vogue
In prose that moves between lyrical and caterwauling, the poet Laura Sims has pulled off the high-wire act of making bitterness delicious
LitHub
Looker is a powerful sylph of a book about creation and destruction and the permeable boundary between them
People
By the end you'll be gasping
Grazia
A simmering sense of dread dominates this brilliant Brooklyn-set debut . . . dazzlingly creepy storytelling, reminiscent of NOTES ON A SCANDAL. Will leave you checking your curtains at night, but this is an utterly absorbing read
New Yorker
Ephemeral fiction with a hard landing - like a window, seen in passing, that glows and goes dark
Wall Street Journal
A sugarcoated poison pill of psychological terror
New Zealand Listener
Confronting and invigorating, a fine portrait of a psyche on the edge . . . although there's plenty of room for beauty in the writing, the quick-fire structure ramps up the pace, and there is an exciting precision and perceptiveness at work
Bookseller, Editor's Choice for July
Sims creates a compelling narrator, who is both sympathetic and disturbing
New Statesman
A short, sharp breath of air . . . Built like a thriller (I tore through it in a day), its impact comes less from grand narrative twists than a queasily forensic examination of one woman's disintegrating life and mind . . . this is a novel I had been craving: an unflinching portrayal of women looking upon each other as disturbingly as men do
Red magazine
A slim novel that has maximum drama
Metro
[A] slick, smart novella. . . cleverly explores the porous borders between life and the imagination. A head-rush novel that explores ideas about femininity and desirability via a thriller-style plot
Heat
Written with a precise, sinister elegance, this is a gripping portrait of one woman's descent into madness
Woman's Weekly
A gripping and multilayered novel
Big Issue
Taut, compelling and packed with memorable phrases. It sings like a perfectly tuned piano