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A provocative and absorbing novel about a teenage girl's intoxicating romance with a powerful older man and her discovery, decades later, that her happy memories are hiding a painful truth.
A rising star in the London arts scene of the early 1970s, gifted composer Ralph Boyd is approached by renowned novelist Edmund Greenslay to score a stage adaptation of his most famous work. Welcomed into Greenslay's sprawling bohemian house in Putney, an artistic and prosperous district in southwest London, the musical wunderkind is introduced to Edmund's beautiful activist wife Ellie, his aloof son Theo, and his young daughter Daphne, who quickly becomes Ralph's muse.
Ralph showers Daphne with tokens of his affection - clandestine gifts and secret notes. In a home that is exciting but often lonely, Daphne finds Ralph to be a dazzling companion for many years. When Ralph accompanies Daphne alone to meet her parents in Greece, their relationship intensifies irrevocably. One person knows the truth about their relationship: Daphne's best friend Jane, whose awe of the intoxicating Greenslay family ensures her silence.
Decades later Daphne is back in London. After years lost to decadence and drug abuse, she is struggling to create a normal, stable life for herself and her adolescent daughter. When circumstances bring her back in touch with her long-lost friend, Jane, their reunion inevitably turns to Ralph, now a world-famous musician also living in the city. Daphne's recollections of her youth and her growing anxiety over her own young daughter eventually lead to an explosive realization that propels her to confront Ralph and their years spent together.
Masterfully told from three diverse viewpoints - victim, perpetrator, and witness - Putney is a subtle and enormously powerful novel about consent, agency, and what we tell ourselves to justify what we do, and what others do to us.
"Starred Review. Zinovieff is obviously working with themes playing out in contemporary culture, but her novel is also reminiscent of the work of Iris Murdoch and A.S. Byatt...Timely and nuanced." - Kirkus
"Told from their three vividly established points of view, and traveling back and forth between the 1970s and today, the novel makes a convincing case for how the anything goes ethos of that earlier decade can lead to a reckoning decades later." - Publishers Weekly
"This book is truly memorable and thought-provoking; throughout, Zinovieff sustains wonderfully perplexing and complex ambiguities. What is love, and what is exploitation? What is truth and what is self-deception? What is righteousness and what is hypocrisy? Can contradictions be simultaneously true?..I'll remember the characters forever." - Louis de Bernieres, author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin
"This is a really important book. I loved it. Thought provoking, emotionally complex, and tackling the topic of the day - the blurred area between consent and abuse." - Esther Freud, author of Love Falls
"The art of its telling is everything: the reader is duped and lulled and excited, just like the child subject, and yet we are able to understand Ralph too, and the switch from uneasy but gripping romantic narrative to discourse of abuse is jolting and shocking and right." - Michèle Roberts author of Daughters of the House
"The ultimate taboo brought to life in a way that's thrillingly disturbing and evocative. I couldn't leave it." - Mary Portas, author of Shop Girl
This information about Putney 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.
Sofka Zinovieff is the author of four previous books, including The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me, and has worked as a freelance journalist and reviewer, her work appearing in the Telegraph Magazine, the Times Literary Supplement, the Financial Times, the Spectator, the Independent Magazine, and the London Magazine. After many years in Athens, she now divides her time between Greece and England. She is married with two daughters.
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