
Soft Core
- Author Brittany Newell
- Narrator Christine Lakin
- Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
- Run Time 10 hours and 39 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Erotic fiction, Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Love and relationships, Narrative theme: Social issues.
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Titles Purchased
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Price p/Title
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What to expect
‘Drew me in like a whirlpool’ NICOLA DINAN
'A beautiful fever dream' KRISTEN ARNETT
'Highly seductive … and fun as hell!' TONY TULATHIMUTTE
'Brittany Newell is truly one to watch' EMMA JANE UNSWORTH
'Incredible … romantic, dangerous and sexy' KATIE BUCKLEY
A hottest book of 2025 in Sunday Times Style, Dazed and Stylist
A blazing novel following a young woman on a wild, hallucinogenic quest for love and selfhood in San Francisco’s seedy underground.
Baby is a dancer at a strip club and at the age of 27, she’s feeling lost. It seems that only Dino, her sweet, cross-dressing, drug-dealing ex-boyfriend can keep her afloat. So, when Dino disappears without so much as a kiss goodbye, she plunges headfirst into San Francisco’s shady erotic underground to find him.
Baby searches through dive bars and old haunts, at the club and at the sex dungeon where she has a part-time dominatrix gig. She encounters clients like Simon, a recluse paying her for increasingly bizarre 'favours' and a philosophizing suicide fetishist named ‘Nobody’, as well as co-workers like Emeline, the balletic new hire who seems to want to steal Baby’s whole identity, starting with her underwear.
It’s not long before she starts to find cryptic notes hidden in her belongings and realises her search is attracting the wrong kind of attention. With her grip on reality loosening and the clock ticking, will Baby manage to put together the pieces and find the only man she’s ever loved? Or might her past catch up with her first?
Manically smart, brutally funny and deeply sexy, Soft Core is a book about desire, fantasy and true love – like no other.
'For the generation whose life is an endless stream of dead-end Hinge dates' Sunday Times Style
'Funny, sexy and surprising, I loved it’ Pip Finkemeyer, author of Sad Girl Novel
'A profound look at sex work and lives unusually lived'Dazed
Critics Review
Praise for Soft Core:
‘Drew me in like a whirlpool – a wild spin into loneliness and desire’ Nicola Dinan, author of Bellies
‘Soft Core is not just a book but a fully realized and highly seductive way of life―louche, fleshy, and freestyle. Brittany Newell, a hoarder of details and perfumer of moods, has written an existential dual-mystery that’s as carefully structured as it is emotionally urgent, like a ransom note in sonnet form. Deeply impressive and fun as hell!’ Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection
‘I was consumed by Soft Core … Newell portrays a San Francisco of dark beauty with an endless revolving door of characters sketched out with great wit, tenderness and generosity. Funny, sexy and surprising, I loved it’ Pip Finkemeyer, author of Sad Girl Novel
‘Newell’s prose is too elegant to be called raw, but the oomph, the heart, makes everything feel so real. I love this world and this narrator, the risks she takes, the story she tells, simple yet so seductive and just teeming with aliveness’ Michelle Tea, author of Black Wave
‘Incredible … It’s the best book I’ve read this year – romantic, dangerous and sexy. It made me cry and made the hair on the back of my neck stand up’ Katie Buckley, author of Hero in Stylist
‘Soft Core is a beautiful fever dream, a slippery, captivating pleasure, a love story stuffed inside a wadded nylon stocking. It’s a novel that wants to get close to you. It wants to bite your neck; it’s the actual promise of a hickey. I can’t remember the last book I read that was even half as tender. I ate it up’ Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth
‘A profound look at sex work and lives unusually lived, and how they can be just as banal as the “normal ones”’ Dazed
‘Brittany Newell is truly one to watch!’ Emma Jane Unsworth, author of Animals
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