(CW: Sexual violence, sexually abusive and exploitative relationships, rape, GBH and injury, mental illness, bulimia, emotional abuse, drug abuse)

If you can get through the really rough moments with deplorable but brilliant Irina, and don't feel overwhelmed by that pretty substantial list of emotionally challenging topics, this novel is an absurdly compelling visceral masterpiece???

Irina is a fine art fetish photographer emerging from a professional lapse after being approached for a career-revitalising gallery exhibition in London. While scouring her photo archives for the show, she finds the brutal past she'd pushed away and sets herself on an apparently familiar spiral of destruction. Yet despite the damage she inflicts, on herself and on everyone around her, the expected consequences never manifest and the void of retribution only pushes her further out of control.

The subversion of the gendered power dynamics of her field is what elevates, but also dislocates, Irina.

'I wonder what the fuck I have to do for people to even recognise me as a threat, you know? Do I have to smash a glass over the head of every man I come into contact with, just so I leave a mark?'

Her relationship with her art is... complicated and the cause/effect between her loss of control in her professional practice and her personal life is still buzzing around in my brain. At times Irina is vulnerable, broken, tragic but she is also inimitable, uncompromising and grotesque. A true terrible beauty.

Eliza Clark. What a bloody phenomenal, abhorrent, propulsive, repulsive, genius piece of writing.
AND A DEBUT??!
Another.
Please.