-
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.
Coco Mellors, author of Blue Sisters
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. Madeline Cash, author of Lost Lambs
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!
Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from…or why…
