“It is rare to find oneself reading so compulsively a book that promises no resolution or easy answers; I admired this combination of intellectual honesty and bravura storytelling.”
“A disturbing, well-structured, nuanced story that provides no simple answers — an important addition to an urgent, current conversation.”
“Certain books worm their way into your soul, grabbing you from the opening paragraph and holding you in their grip until the final page has been turned.”
“A Lolita for the age of #MeToo … It delves deep into the discussions surrounding consent and abuse of power. She has written a contemporary Lolita in which the rules of engagement have changed, women are speaking out about the ways they have been misused and the Humbert Humberts face prosecution and disgrace.”
“Thought-provoking and relevant, Sofka Zinovieff’s new novel “Putney” will provide plenty of book groups with fodder for discussions about female sexuality, child molestation, friendship and the #MeToo movement.”
“A finely nuanced study of the way different people make subjective sense of the past, and a reminder that the novel (like the analyst’s couch) is a great space for thinking about the unthinkable.”
“Involving, beautifully written, and subtle… an incredibly unnerving account of abuse and its consequences… There are terribly difficult questions here, dealt with sensitively and intelligently.”
“A novel that interrogates the intersection of love, desire, and abuse… Timely and nuanced.”
“A powerful – and timely – examination of desire and permission, innocence versus experience. “All children liked secrets, didn’t they..?”
“Unputdownable: a modern classic.”
“among the hottest books of this blazing summer.”
“A thoughtful, sophisticated, often unnerving treatment of a vexed topic.”
“An intelligent, subtle novel which explores the fallout of sexual abuse all wrapped up in an engrossing piece of storytelling, so good that I included it on my Man Booker wish list… I take my hat off to its author for tackling such a tricky subject with compassion and intelligence.”
“A rising star in the London arts scene of the early 1970s, gifted composer Ralph Boyd is approached by renowned novelist Edmund Greenslay to score a stage adaptation of his most famous work.”
“At no point does the narrative stoop to simplicities of blame and amends; everything stays refreshingly, disturbingly more complicated than that. Putney is a story about the long shadow abuse can cast on the lives of all involved, but it consistently works on intellectual and emotional levels in order to tell that story, leaving hymn-book moralizing for lesser treatments.”
“I find it impossible to predict the reaction of anyone I know to the nuances of character and situation, and for all these reasons, this is a novel I admire and highly recommend.”
“The novel that will have everyone talking.”
“An incendiary story of sexual obsession and abuse …traveling back and forth between the 1970s and today, the novel makes a convincing case for how the anything goes ethos of that earlier decade can lead to a reckoning decades later.”