Join us as we welcome Olivia Sudjic and Lucia Osborne-Crowley to celebrate the publication of ASYLUM ROAD, Olivia’s highly anticipated new novel. The event will be streaming via Instagram Live.

A couple drive from London to coastal Provence. Anya is preoccupied with what she feels is a relationship on the verge; unequal, precarious. Luke, reserved, stoic, gives away nothing. As the sun sets one evening, he proposes, and they return to London engaged.

But planning a wedding does little to settle Anya’s unease. As a child, she escaped from Sarajevo, and the idea of security is as alien now as it was then. When social convention forces Anya to return, she begins to change. The past she sought to contain for as long as she can remember resurfaces, and the hot summer builds to a startling climax.

Lean, sly and unsettling, Asylum Road is about the many borders governing our lives: between men and women, assimilation and otherness, nations, families, order and chaos.

What happens, and who do we become, when they break down?

Olivia Sudjic is a writer living in London. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Financial Times, Guardian and the Paris Review. She is the author of Exposure, a personal essay, and Sympathy, her debut novel, which was a finalist for the Salerno European Book Award, the Collyer Bristow Prize and has been translated into five languages. Her new novel Asylum Road publishes in January 2021.

Lucia Osborne-Crowley is a writer and journalist. Her news reporting and literary work has appeared in Granta, GQ, The Sunday Times, HuffPost UK, the Guardian, ABC News, Meanjin, The Lifted Brow and others.Her first book, I Choose Elena, was published in 2019 and has since been published in four territories and three languages. Her second book, My Body Keeps Your Secrets, will be published in October 2021.

Join us as we welcome Rebecca Watson and Helen Charman to celebrate the publication of little scratch, Rebecca’s much-anticipated debut novel. The event will be streaming via Instagram Live.

little scratch tells the story of a day in the life of an unnamed woman, living in a lower-case world of demarcated fridge shelves and office politics; clock-watching and WhatsApp notifications. In a voice that is fiercely wry, touchingly delicate and increasingly neurotic, the protagonist relays what it takes to get through the quotidian detail of that single trajectory – from morning to night – while processing recent sexual violence.

little scratch is about the coexistence of monotony with our waking, intelligent lives. It is a powerful evocation of how the external and internal aspects of our lives exist in a helix, and what it means to live out the course of a single day consumed by trauma.

Rebecca Watson is Assistant Arts Editor at the Financial Times. Her work has been published in the Times Literary Supplement and Granta. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize.

Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her second pamphlet Daddy Poem was shortlisted for the 2019 Ivan Juritz Prize; her latest, In the Pleasure Dairy, is published by Sad Press. Her first nonfiction book, Mother State—a political history of motherhood—is forthcoming from Allen Lane. She teaches English Literature at Durham University, and is an associate member of staff at Camberwell College of Arts and the Glasgow School of Art. As resident commissioning editor at MAP magazine, she is running the year-long TENANCY project.