Lauren Joseph

A Talented Mr Ripley for contemporary Berlin: a twisting, sensual, heady and razor-sharp exploration of creativity, fame, desire and the divided self‘Riotous and raunchy ... ? alaciou? om? f breathtakin? elf-invention an? pectacular self-destruction’ Service95‘The book that’s been missing from my reading habits: classically glamourous, timelessly seductive’ Torrey Peters‘An erotic spectacular of self-creation and spiralling disintegration’ Olivia Laing____________________________________________________Charli has finished art school and now has no idea what to do with her life. She’s broke, disillusioned and her flatmates hate her. One night at a bar in Soho, however, everything changes when she first encounters the charismatic musician Alexander Geist. Androgynous, glamorously handsome, mysterious and just a little sinister, he feels something like a soul mate; and so when he heads off to Berlin, Charli follows. There, at the centre of the city’s febrile party scene, Charli and Alexander embark on their great project: to make Alexander into the biggest star since David Bowie. But Alexander is elusive, mercurial; and Charli is in over her head before she realises just how self-destructive her life has become under his spell. A story of obsession and excess, doppelgängers and disassociation, fame and the terrible things we do to feel loved, Lean Cat, Savage Cat is an unforgettable novel from one of the most exciting writers at work today.

It's four in the morning, and our narrator is walking home from the club when they realise that it's February 29th – the birthday of the man who was something like their first love. Piecing together art, letters and memory, they set about trying to write the story of a doomed affair that first sparked and burned a decade ago. Ten years earlier, and our young narrator and a boy named Thomas James fall into bed with one another over the summer of their graduation. Their ensuing affair, with its violent, animal intensity and its intoxicating and toxic power play will initiate a dance of repulsion and attraction that will cross years, span continents, drag in countless victims – and culminate in terrible betrayal. At Certain Points We Touch is a story of first love and last rites, conjured against a vivid backdrop of London, San Francisco and New York – a riotous, razor-sharp coming-of-age story that marks the arrival of an extraordinary new talent.