Asylum Road Synopsis
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?
About This Edition
Olivia Sudjic Press Reviews
'Asylum Road is also the work of a literary voice maturing...it is taut and propulsive...masterful and wicked' - Daily Telegraph
'A caustic, claustrophobic - and distinctly European - reinvention of the road novel ... Sudjic is a cartographer of menace' - Times Literary Supplement
'Sudjic seems to be writing not with words but somehow with the absences between them. This book feels like the breakdown not only of a character but of, as you read, the reader. I will go wherever she takes me. A phenomenal book' - Daisy Johnson
'Confident and timely ... Asylum Road shows Sudjic confidently expanding the reach of her fiction, with an unerring instinct for asking timely questions' - Observer
'A fragmented, unsettling story, and an interesting meditation on modern relationships, families, guilt and what happens when escape starts to feel more like exile' - Independent, Books of the Week
'Admirable ... A novel pervaded by a genuinely unnerving sense of anxiety, dread and unease ... Reaches a gloriously near-unhinged intensity ... As Sudjic so expertly illustrates, sometimes there's not a lot of difference between taking and losing control.' - Financial Times
'Sly, unsettling and supremely accomplished ' - i news
'I adored this beautifully written, powerful exploration of how past trauma is never far from the surface, however deeply one tries to stifle it ... Deep, accomplished and often thought-provoking' - Daily Mail
'A smart and sensitively layered story ... Sudjic's novel is full of raw emotion and visceral description ... This is a book about the gaps in our collective experience, and the tension that fills them. It's about memory and identity and things left unsaid' - Spectator
'Haunting and haunted ... Sudjic coolly executes a climax as treacherous and unexpected as a hairpin bend'. - Economist
'An early treat' - Independent, The books to look out for in 2021
