Soft Core

'A beautiful fever dream, a slippery, captivating pleasure' KRISTEN ARNETT, author of With Teeth

‘Drew me in like a whirlpool – a wild spin into loneliness and desire’ Nicola Dinan, author of Bellies

'Brittany Newell is truly one to watch!' EMMA JANE UNSWORTH, author of Animals

A blazing novel following a young woman on a wild, hallucinogenic quest for love and selfhood in San Francisco’s seedy underground.

Baby is a dancer at a strip club and at the age of 27, she’s feeling lost. It seems that only Dino, her sweet, cross-dressing, drug-dealing ex-boyfriend can keep her afloat. So, when Dino disappears without so much as a kiss goodbye, she plunges headfirst into San Francisco’s shady erotic underground to find him.

Baby searches through dive bars and old haunts, at the club and at the sex dungeon where she has a part-time dominatrix gig. She encounters clients like Simon, a recluse paying her for increasingly bizarre “favours” and a philosophizing suicide fetishist named ‘Nobody’, as well as coworkers like Emeline, the balletic new hire who seems to want to steal Baby’s whole identity, starting with her underwear.

It’s not long before she starts to find cryptic notes hidden in her belongings and realises her search is attracting the wrong kind of attention. With her grip on reality loosening and the clock ticking, will Baby manage to put together the pieces and find the only man she’s ever loved? Or might her past catch up with her first?

Manically smart, brutally funny and deeply sexy, Soft Core is a book about desire, fantasy, and true love – like no other.