Asylum Road
- Author Olivia Sudjic
- Narrator Helen Keeley
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
- Publish Date 25 February 2021
- Run Time 6 hours
- Format Audio
- Genre Fiction: general and literary, Modern and contemporary fiction.
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Listen to a sample
What to expect
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?
'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?
Critics Review
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
A caustic, claustrophobic – and distinctly European – reinvention of the road novel ... Sudjic is a cartographer of menace
Asylum Road is also the work of a literary voice maturing…it is taut and propulsive…masterful and wicked
Confident and timely ... Asylum Road shows Sudjic confidently expanding the reach of her fiction, with an unerring instinct for asking timely questions
A fragmented, unsettling story, and an interesting meditation on modern relationships, families, guilt and what happens when escape starts to feel more like exile
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.
Sly, unsettling and supremely accomplished
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
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
Haunting and haunted ... Sudjic coolly executes a climax as treacherous and unexpected as a hairpin bend.
An early treat
Haunting and haunted ... Sudjic coolly executes a climax as treacherous and unexpected as a hairpin bend
Sudjic’s writing is hers alone and in this unsettling, disturbing and piercing novel, she tells the unravelling of Anya as she faces up to a past she’s tried to run from and a present that demands too much
A vivid picture of disintegration and suppressed trauma
Chilling
Asylum Road is a slick, treacly delight - by turns, blackly comic and heart-shattering. There is often the sense that the real story is happening between the words on the page, like the memory of a dream tucked in some nook of the mind, just out of reach but tantalisingly close if you could just angle yourself correctly to reach it
Carries echoes of Deborah Levy and Rachel Cusk. It’sa book about love and history, trauma and identity
The hot summer builds to a startling climax
Carries echoes of Deborah Levy and Rachel Cusk. It's a book about love and history, trauma and identity
A brilliant, scalding novel that is both intimate and restless, restrained and unpredictable. Sudjic’s prose is as elegant and searching as ever; her evocation of trauma and longing is sharp, intricately layered, impossible to forget
Looks at what happens when love and social conventions collide
Sudjic’s writing is hers alone and in this unsettling, disturbing and piercing novel, she tells the unravelling of Anya as she faces up to a past she’s tried to run from and a present that demands too much
I can safely say that no one conjures anxiety like Olivia Sudjic. She has written a strange and sophisticated novel, and the experience of inhabiting the mind of her narrator is both terrifying and numinous
Looks at what happens when love and social conventions collide
This early part of the year is a fertile time for several millennial writers who have already established themselves as names to watch. Olivia Sudjic’s new novel Asylum Road follows her success with 2017’s Sympathy
[A]n impressive novel; Sudjic’s cool affect and sense of detachment provides cover for a growing sense of urgency and alienation
The hot summer builds to a startling climax
Olivia Sudjic's powerful novel pulses with the strange, fragmented, apocalyptic rhythms of our uneasy present and uncertain future. Visceral and tender, brutal and unspeakably alive, Asylum Road digs into the soft heart of our hard times, into intimacies upended by the anthropocene and pulled taught by omnipresent crisis
If positive reviews from the likes of Avni Doshi and Daisy Johnson don’t sway you, Sudjic’s unsettling, but nonetheless brilliant prose should
[A] piercingly clear look at a modern world grappling with immigration and history in post-Brexit Britain, through the prism of a couple on the verge of making life-changing decisions. Exploring otherness and the borders between men and women, nations and families, it’s edgy, unsettling and yet incredibly sensitive
This early part of the year is a fertile time for several millennial writers who have already established themselves as names to watch. Olivia Sudjic’s new novel Asylum Road follows her success with 2017’s Sympathy
Sudjic singularly conveys a feeling so specific to our time – a feeling only her prose can name, and which the reader will instantly recognize. The unsettled, unsettling atmosphere of this book resonates perfectly with its larger states of migration – to or from one's history, one's nation, one's loved ones; away from or towards one's darkest impulses. Smart, edgy and exacting, Asylum Road leaves so much unsaid, and shows us the consequences of that'
Chilling
Bold, astonishing and original. Sudjic explores relationships in post-Brexit Britain with her trademark precision and lyricism
[A] piercingly clear look at a modern world grappling with immigration and history in post-Brexit Britain, through the prism of a couple on the verge of making life-changing decisions. Exploring otherness and the borders between men and women, nations and families, it’s edgy, unsettling and yet incredibly sensitive
An impressive novel; Sudjic’s cool affect and sense of detachment provides cover for a growing sense of urgency and alienation’
Asylum Road is an exceptionally intelligent, sensitive, and thoughtful novel about 21st century life. With subtlety and control, Sudjic powerfully examines the consequences of Brexit, immigration, and historical trauma. With the energy of a thriller and an emotionally raw finale reminiscent of Elena Ferrante, Asylum Road is a very special book indeed
Writing with the offbeat intensity of Deborah Levy, Sudjic offers a discomforting dissection of one woman’s fractured identity. Atmospheric and unflinching, Asylum Road reveals how the places we seek refuge can ultimately prove to be as toxic as the traumas we flee
If positive reviews from the likes of Avni Doshi and Daisy Johnson don’t sway you, Sudjic’s unsettling, but nonetheless brilliant prose should
A swelter of trauma and neurosis, Asylum Road is a thrilling, bruising read. Sudjic’s prose scythes through political, sexual and class constructs to expose the cruel and fatuous power plays that can undo us at any moment
Asylum Road masterfully probes the tensions between the identities we inherit and identities we craft. Sudjic’s writing coagulates feelings of anxiety and insecurity into an embodied, wrought and visceral experience. Asylum Road is that rare novel that dares to probe at uncomfortable questions without flinching from the unwelcome answers that are revealed
Electrifying ... A taut, disquieting story ... In precise, elliptical prose, Sudjic paints a powerful portrait of a psyche damaged by war and family schisms. A meditation on identity and belonging, Asylum Road speaks to our unsettled times
An intricately layered, shimmeringly intelligent look at trauma, anxiety and identity
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