Looker: A Novel
Wow, wow, wow! Anyone who has ever appreciated an unreliable narrator will be transfixed by this story of obsession and creeping madness. In the wake of infertility and a looming divorce, our unnamed protagonist becomes more and more preoccupied by the seemingly perfect actress who lives down the block. You’ll read Looker in one sitting and want to pass it on to everyone you know — this is a stunner and a fantastic debut.
Description
*Featured on Best of Lists in Vogue, People, Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple, Southern Living, and more*
In this “wicked slow burn” (Entertainment Weekly) of psychological suspense from the author of How Can I Help You, a woman becomes fixated on her neighbor—the actress.
Though the two women live just a few doors apart, a chasm lies between them. The actress, a celebrity with a charmed career, shares a gleaming brownstone with her handsome husband and three adorable children, while the recently separated narrator, unhappily childless and stuck in a dead-end job, lives in a run-down, three-story walk-up with her ex-husband’s cat.
As her fascination with her famous neighbor grows, the narrator’s hold on reality begins to slip. Before long, she’s collecting cast-off items from the actress’s stoop and fantasizing about sleeping with the actress’s husband. After a disastrous interaction with the actress at the annual block party, what began as an innocent preoccupation turns into a stunning—and irrevocable—unraveling.
A riveting portrait of obsession, Looker is “a sugarcoated poison pill of psychological terror” (The Wall Street Journal) and an immersive and darkly entertaining read—“by the end you’ll be gasping” (People).
Praise for Looker: A Novel
"In prose that moves between lyrical and caterwauling, the poet Laura Sims has pulled off the high-wire act of making bitterness delicious." —Vogue
"[Looker] is an ephemeral fiction with a hard landing—like a window, seen in passing, that glows and goes dark." —The New Yorker
“Sims’s debut is a breathless and unrelenting portrait of one woman’s unraveling.” —Greer Hendricks, New York Times bestselling co-author of The Wife Between Us
"An unflinching portrayal of women looking upon each other as disturbingly as men do.” —The New Statesman
"A perfect, dark pleasure. . . . A rare debut filled with gorgeous sentences, savory twists, and shot through with ferocious truths, this is the kind of book that can only be written by an author who is thrillingly unafraid." —Mona Awad, author of Bunny
