Super Host

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What to expect

Being lost in a place you know by heart is one of life's most disconcerting feelings

Bennett Driscoll is a Turner Prize nominated artist who was a Bright Young Thing. Now, aged 55, his wife has left him, the reviews have dried up, and his gallery wants to stop selling his paintings, saying they'll have more value retrospectively...when he's dead. So, left with a large West London home and no income, he moves into his painting studio in the back garden and rents out the house, soon reaching status as a Super Host on AirBed.

At last, the money is coming in, but he's loveless and, well, lonely. Turns out his house guests are as quirky, lost and entertaining as Bennett himself, unwittingly unlocking the parts of Bennett's life that have been forgotten to him for too long, but can they help him feel less lost in the place he knows best?

Wry, rueful and rich in observation, SUPER HOST provides a delicious portrait of middle-age, marriage, and the underlying fears and loneliness that colour so many lives.

(P)2020 Headline Publishing Group Ltd

Critics Review

Exploring identity, creativity and second chances, Russo's midlife drama is wise, tender and surprising
Mail on Sunday
Brimming with...pure affection
The New York Times Book Review
Funny, sharp, and artistic...A wonderful book flanked with irony, perversity, Rear Window voyeurism, and women who understand the task of reinvention, Super Host is a case study of what we talk about when we talk about success
Lit Hub
In Russo's charming and poignant debut...the author writes with warm sympathy and humour. A treat for fans of Nick Hornby and Tom Perrotta
Kirkus
This is the compulsively readable story of Bennett, a once-famous artist now divorced and impoverished, who lives in his garden studio and spies on his tenants through the windows. Super Host is hilarious, and touching, too; Kate Russo is a terrific storyteller.
Claire Messud
I gobbled up Super Host, Kate Russo's smart, funny, and surprising first novel. She writes with such a generous and insightful eye about love, loneliness and artistic ambition, and has redrawn the lines that connect people in fiction through the most modern and unlikely of settings, the home share.
Jess Walter
Kate Russo's debut Super Host is pure delight-smart, fun, poignant, and deeply satisfying. I loved it
Lily King
Super Host isn't just a charming, compulsively readable, romantically suspenseful novel about a lonely man who gets himself emotionally enmeshed with a series of short-term tenants. Kate Russo's wise and funny debut also has a lot to say about the courage it takes to start over in the middle of your life. It's a joy from start to finish.
Tom Perrotta

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