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