“Obsessed!” —Chloë Sevigny “I am literally obsessed.” —Busy Philipps Hailed as “richly intimate” and “wickedly delightful” (The New York Times Book Review), this steamy and incisive debut adult novel follows one woman’s affair with her daughter’s best friend, testing the limits of love and ambition. It’s opening night, but Alice’s performance in the local Bay Area production of The Winter’s Tale is far from glamorous. She doesn’t have dreams of stardom, but the basement theater in a wildfire-choked town isn’t exactly what she envisioned for her career back home in Los Angeles. To make matters worse, her best friend Sadie is not even coming. Pragmatic, serious Sadie and flighty, creative Alice have been best friends since high school—really one another’s only friends—but now that they are through with college (which they attended together) and living on opposite ends of California, Alice would at least expect her friend’s support. Sadie, determined not to cancel her plans with her boyfriend, ends up enlisting the help of her mother, Celine. A professor of women’s and gender studies at UC Berkeley, Celine’s landmark treatise on sex and identity made her notorious, but she’s struggling to write her new book in a post-second-wave feminist world. So, when Sadie begs her to attend Alice’s play, she relents, if only to escape writer’s block. But in a turn of perplexing events, Celine becomes entranced by Alice’s performance and realizes that her daughter’s once lanky, slightly annoying best friend is now an irresistible young woman. Set over the course of decades—from Alice and Sadie’s early friendship days and Celine’s decision to leave her husband to the radical movements of 1990s Berkeley and navigating contemporary Hollywood—Alice and Celine’s affair will test the limits of their love for Sadie and their own beliefs of power, agency, and feminism. Witty and relatable, sexy and surprising, Sarah Blakley-Cartwright’s debut adult novel is a mesmerizing portrait of the inner lives of three very different women.

サラ・ブレイクリー＝カートライトは、母娘と親友という聖域に欲望の毒を滴らせ、愛と権力の境界を鮮烈に描き出しました。知的なフェミニズム論と生々しい官能が交錯する文体は、読者の倫理を激しく揺さぶり、三人の女性が抱く剥き出しの野心と孤独を浮き彫りにします。 映像版が視覚的な熱情で肉体の繋がりを強調する一方、原作は内面の深淵を掘り下げる言葉の迷宮です。テキスト特有の緻密な心理描写と、映像が放つ耽美な緊張感が共鳴し合い、一つの愛が数十年かけて変貌する様を多層的に体験できる、まさに文学と映像の幸福な止揚がここにあります。