-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
A raw and unforgettable portrait of sex, friendship, and the perilous edge of liberation for two young women—set against the neon-lit porn world of 1980s Los Angeles.
Los Angeles, 1982. Jude is eighteen, newly out of reform school and hungry for more than her small-town past can offer. Searching for her best friend, Winnie, she instead falls under the spell of Laird, an older man with a motorcycle, a needle, and a taste for danger. What begins as escape soon unravels into motel rooms, stickups, and drug binges.
Then Jude finds Winnie, reinvented as Velvet at a Sunset Strip club. Together, the two girls imagine a future: bartending, dancing, writing the novels they dream of, building a home of their own. But the same world that promises glamour and freedom is poised to consume them, and survival demands that they navigate the men who offer love, power, and escape—always at a cost.
With Joan Didion's eye for California's allure and shadows, and told in a two-part structure reminiscent of Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies, Lovers XXX is a hypnotic novel of friendship and self-invention, of sexual identity beyond binaries, and of the costs of giving one's body to the performance of sex. Above all, it is a love story like no other—between two ardent, vulnerable, and revelatory women.
"Rowbottom's portrayal of the porn demimonde is exciting and gritty without feeling lurid, and the novel doubles as a moving ode to the value of a female friendship. It's a knockout." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Rowbottom's sophomore outing offers a powerful, vivid, visceral look at the heyday of the adult film industry from the perspectives of the women who populated it." —Booklist
"Lovers XXX tackles the sticky subjects of female sexuality, objectification and desire with a smoothness that appears effortless. Allie Rowbottom's writing has a rare combination of deep compassion, prescient insight, and just plain coolness that I'm in awe of." —Coco Mellors, author of Blue Sisters
"You're thrown right into Lovers XXX and it doesn't stop. Allie writes about desire, survival, intimacy, and exploitation with a kind of feral tenderness. She turns stick-ups, strip clubs, and motel rooms into a fever dream that makes ruin look romantic. Impossible to put down!" —Madeline Cash, author of Lost Lambs
This information about Lovers XXX 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.
Allie Rowbottom is the author of the novel Aesthetica and the memoir Jell-O Girls, a New York Times Editors' Choice Selection, Indie Next Pick, and Real Simple Best Book of the Year. Allie's essays and short fiction can be found in Vanity Fair, Salon, Lit Hub, No Tokens, NY Tyrant, The Drunken Canal, Alta Journal, Bitch, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the writer Jon Lindsey.
If you liked Lovers XXX, try these:
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
