Sympathy

Description

At 23, Alice Hare leaves England for New York - the city of her birth, before she was adopted by a British mother and an American father. As she falls in love with the big city, she also becomes fixated on Mizuko Himura, an intriguing Japanese writer living in New York whose life has strange parallels with her own. Their 'chance' encounter and subsequent relationship expose a dark tangle of lies and sexual encounters as three families across the globe collide, and the most ancient of questions - where do we come from? - can be answered just by searching online.Sympathy is a brilliant and deeply moving take on personal accountability, blood ties, and our tormented efforts to connect in the digital age. It examines how we relate to each other and the world around us in an age of hyperconnectivity and algorithms. 'Imagine Alice Through the Looking Glass for the Instagram generation and you'll get a sense of Sympathy.' - The Observer

Born in London in 1988, Sudjic studied English at Cambridge University where she was awarded the E.G. Harwood English Prize and made a Bateman Scholar. She has worked as a runner and a brand strategist. Sudjic now lives in South London and is working on a second novel.

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, Author to Watch 2017 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 -- Alex Preston Observer, Fiction to Look out for in 2017 A novel examining the interaction of technology and self The Lady, Must-reads for 2017 A tale of obsession and doubling in the digital age -- Lucy Scholes Bookanista, Spring 2017 Highlights The reason to read this novel, aside from the au courant topic, is the luscious, absorbing writing Library Journal 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' 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' Getting to know someone has always been a thorny affair. With the addition of personal devices the line between bonding and surveillance has become freakishly blurred. 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' An impressive debut. Complex, crisp and highly topical Vesna Goldsworthy, author of 'Gorsky' and 'Chernobyl Strawberries' Olivia Sudjic has written a masterful, mysterious, mindfuck. A dark, nuanced, fantastical and thrilling debut novel, posing questions of reality vs. fiction and exploring the ways that infatuation causes us to lose ourselves Chloe Caldwell, author of 'Women' and 'I'll Tell You in Person'