Asylum Road

Bloomsbury presents Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic, read by Helen Keeley.
'I will go wherever she takes me. A phenomenal book' DAISY JOHNSON
'A brilliant, scalding novel ... sharp, intricately layered, impossible to forget' MEGAN HUNTER
'Stunning ... beautifully written and deeply unsettling' BOOKSELLER, EDITOR'S CHOICE
CHOSEN AS A 2021 BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR BY OBSERVER, DAILY TELEGRAPH, INDEPENDENT, FINANCIAL TIMES, EVENING STANDARD, GRAZIA, STYLIST, ELLE THE NATIONAL, FIVE BOOKS AND BURO
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, Paris Review, Granta, Frieze, Financial Times, Guardian, Vogue and Wired. 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.