Crash Into Me
A Novel
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
“Glittery and sensuous.” —TIME magazine (A Most Anticipated Book of 2026)
In a keenly observed departure from her blockbuster debut, The Idea of You, Robinne Lee delivers a completely new, fearlessly intimate novel of messy, complicated relationships—one that delves into desire, race, power, and the shifting terrain of identity and selfhood.
What happens when a fantasy from your past collides with your reality?
In a complicated marriage and raising her children in Los Angeles’s toxic playground of privilege and power, Cecilia Chen is struggling to find her real self among the many labels assigned to her: wife, mother, artist, daughter.
Until the moment she crashes–literally–into the Anouk Ferrand. It’s been twenty years since she last encountered the enigmatic model on a photo shoot in Mexico.
And it’s this chance second meeting that will upend Cecilia’s life.
Seeing Anouk again forces Cecilia to revisit their brief time together and question where she truly fits in. Can the renewed intensity of her explosive physical and emotional entanglement with Anouk finally give her an answer?
Heartbreakingly real and emotionally layered, Crash Into Me illuminates the unexpected detours that change our lives forever.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Robinne Lee’s follow-up to her smash-hit debut novel, The Idea of You, glows with the same brilliant emotional intensity even as it explores radically new styles and themes. Photographer Cecelia Chen feels lost and overwhelmed. She’s recently uprooted her family from Paris to Los Angeles so that her husband can direct a big-budget movie, and her sense of her own identity feels like it’s slipping. Then, by chance, a three-car accident brings her back into contact with Anouk, a woman she hasn’t seen since their romance ended two decades ago. Through a dual-timeline narrative and an immersive, stream-of-conscious style, Lee draws us into the past, where Cecelia and Anouk’s affair began, and the present, where it tentatively continues. This is a deeply ruminative novel, full of Cecelia’s cascading thoughts about beauty, class, gender dynamics, gun culture, her husband’s affair, and what it means for her and her children to be mixed race in America. Crash into Me is a yearning, deliberate, and gorgeously complex read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An artist explores her relationship with a veteran supermodel in the enticing latest from Lee (The Idea of You). Cecilia Chen's life has just been doubly disrupted, first by moving with her husband, François, and their two children from her beloved Paris home to Los Angeles in 2015, where François has been hired to film a big-budget trilogy, and second by the discovery of François's affair with his much younger leading lady. The action begins in L.A., when Cecilia gets into a three-car accident with Anouk Ferrand, whom she first met in 1996 at a fashion shoot in Cabo San Lucas. Back then, Cecilia, who's now a fine artist, was in her 20s and working as a photo assistant, and teenaged Anouk was on her way to fame as a model. Lee moves fluidly between Cecilia's tentative present-day affair with Anouk and flashbacks to 1996, in which it's gradually revealed what happened in Cabo San Lucas. Throughout, Lee explores the theme of power dynamics in sexual relationships and proves herself a steely observer of class and racial tensions, as Cecilia reflects on her middle-class parents' hang-ups about her new rarefied life and the complex identity she inherited from her Indian Jamaican mother and Chinese Jamaican father. This will keep readers turning the pages.
