Critics' Opinion:
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Published Apr 2017
416 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
An electrifying debut novel of obsessive love, family secrets, and the dangers of living our lives online.
At twenty-three, Alice Hare leaves England for New York. She becomes fixated on Mizuko Himura, a Japanese writer living in New York, whose life story has strange parallels to her own and who she believes is her "Internet twin." What seems to Mizuko like a chance encounter with Alice is anything but - after all, in the age of connectivity, nothing is coincidence. Their subsequent relationship is doomed from the outset, exposing a tangle of lies and sexual encounters as three families across the globe collide, and the most ancient of questions - where do we come from? - is answered just by searching online.
In its heady evocation of everything from Haruki Murakami to Patricia Highsmith to Edith Wharton, Sympathy is utterly original - a thrilling tale of obsession, doubling, blood ties, and our tormented efforts to connect in the digital age.
"The reason to read this novel, aside from the au courant topic, is the luscious, absorbing writing." - Library Journal
"While some readers will find the ending confusing and unsatisfying, none will be bored by this frenetic, timely story of digital fixation actualized." - Publishers Weekly
"An intriguing premise delivered in turgid prose." - Kirkus
"In this zeitgeisty debut, Olivia Sudjic has revealed herself to be an erudite writer who can weave together themes of online obsessions, family secrets and unexpected parallel lives...Filled with explosive intelligence and dark humour, Sympathy is both beautiful and raw, and captures the essence of personal responsibility in the digital age." - Elle (UK)
"[Sympathy] the best fictional account I've read of the way the internet has shaped our inner lives. A literary thriller that confirms the arrival of a major new talent." - The Guardian (UK)
"In this unbelievably accomplished first novel, Olivia Sudjic creates a narrator whose compelling voice is timeless, even as her obsessions and the tools she uses to satisfy them are up-to-the-minute modern. At once a riveting mystery and a literary tour de force, Sympathy had me spellbound from the first page to the last." - Emily Gould, author of Friendship
"Sympathy is a mind-bending novel that skillfully depicts the bizarre interplay of technology and intimacy with a story that is compassionate, funny, and incredibly alarming." - Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond
"Olivia Sudjic elegantly explores the warped world of intimacies formed online - and how quickly those intimacies derail. Global in scope, as subtle as it is suspenseful, Sympathy is an extraordinary debut." - Idra Novey, author of Ways to Disappear
This information about Sympathy was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Olivia Sudjic was born in London in 1988. She studied English Literature at Cambridge University where she was awarded the E.G. Harwood English Prize and made a Bateman Scholar. She lives in London and started writing her first novel, Sympathy, in 2014.
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