Soft Core
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
‘Highly seductive … and fun as hell!’ TONY TULATHIMUTTE
‘A noirish thriller, a sex-work satire, a romance’ OBSERVER
‘Drew me in like a whirlpool’ NICOLA DINAN
‘For the generation whose life is an endless stream of dead-end Hinge dates’ SUNDAY TIMES STYLE
A hottest book of 2025 in Sunday Times Style, Dazed, AnOther and Stylist.
Baby spends her days with her sweet, cross-dressing, drug-dealing ex-boyfriend, Dino, and every night dancing at Paradise Lost, a strip club where she transforms into whatever, or whoever, her clients want her to be.
When Dino disappears suddenly, Baby plunges headfirst into San Francisco’s shady erotic underground of dive bars and sex dungeons to find him. In this mirror world, she encounters a surreal cast of characters: Simon, a recluse who pays her for increasingly bizarre favours; a suicide fetishist named Nobody; and Emeline, Paradise’s balletic new hire who seems to want to steal Baby’s whole identity, starting with her underwear.
With her grip on reality loosening, and the clock ticking, will Baby manage to find the only man she’s ever loved? Or might her past catch up with her first?
‘Vivid … Exhilarating … Soft Core is pacey and rich, full of verve, drama and detail’ NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
‘A hugely enjoyable exploration of all the strange things people desire’ THE TIMES
‘Incredible … the best book I’ve read this year – romantic, dangerous and sexy. It made me cry’ STYLIST
‘A profound look at sex work and lives unusually lived’ DAZED
About the author
Brittany Newell is a writer and performer whose work has been published in Granta, n+1, the New York Times, Joyland, Dazed and Playgirl. She published her debut novel, Oola, at the age of twenty-one. She lives in San Francisco.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Newell (Oola) delivers a crackerjack novel of a sex worker who comes undone after her ex-boyfriend's disappearance. Ruth, the 27-year-old narrator, mainly uses her stripper name, Baby. She rates herself a seven out of 10, and her life feels "loose, like favorite panties with the elastic stretched out." She lives in San Francisco with her ex Dino, a ketamine dealer with a dangerous side (he owns nunchucks) and a soft side (he loves Dolly Parton, secretly wears women's lingerie, and dotes on his rescue dogs). Their breakup was amicable, and they remain close. When Dino goes missing, Baby tries not to panic, remembering how he'd once told her, "If something ever happens to me... don't call the cops. Just sit tight and be cool." She takes another job as a dominatrix to fill the time, and in her sleep deprivation, she starts hallucinating Dino's face on strangers. She's also rattled by a new dancer at the club, the prettier Emeline, who copies her in unnerving ways, first by borrowing a pair of her panties and wearing them every night on stage, then by using the same perfume. Newell makes the most of Baby's unreliable narration, conveying her deteriorating mental state as she struggles to hold onto her sense of self, and the wild ride is bolstered by striking prose and memorable imagery. It's a stellar entry in the literature of unhinged women, up there with Mona Awad's Bunny.
