Press Reviews

• Leni Zumas, author of RED CLOCKS

  With an agile precision reminiscent of Lydia Davis, Laura Sims captures the obsessiveness of a woman who unravels after the collapse of her marriage. A taut, gripping portrait, all the more sinister for its elegance

• Peter Straub, author of A Dark Matter and Interior Darkness

  This intense, gripping first novel from Laura Sims shoehorns us into a gathering disquiet and sense of dread, heightened at every turn by our sympathetic understanding of her relentlessly unraveling protagonist. The precise, observant writing slips through the skin without ever calling attention to itself

• Publishers Weekly, starred review

  Jealousy rears its ugly head in Sims's chilling and riveting debut. In this tightly plotted novel, Sims takes the reader fully into the mind of a woman becoming increasingly unhinged, and turns her emotionally fraught journey into a provocative tale about the dangers of coveting what belongs to another

• Booklist

  A dark and stylish drama featuring a self-aware yet unstable narrator

• Greer Hendricks, co-author of THE WIFE BETWEEN US

  Sims's debut is a breathless and unrelenting portrait of one woman's unraveling

• Tammy Cohen

  Unsettling and compelling

• Vogue

  In prose that moves between lyrical and caterwauling, the poet Laura Sims has pulled off the high-wire act of making bitterness delicious

• LitHub

  Looker is a powerful sylph of a book about creation and destruction and the permeable boundary between them

• People

  By the end you'll be gasping

• Grazia

  A simmering sense of dread dominates this brilliant Brooklyn-set debut . . . dazzlingly creepy storytelling, reminiscent of NOTES ON A SCANDAL. Will leave you checking your curtains at night, but this is an utterly absorbing read

• New Yorker

  Ephemeral fiction with a hard landing - like a window, seen in passing, that glows and goes dark

• Wall Street Journal

  A sugarcoated poison pill of psychological terror

• New Zealand Listener

  Confronting and invigorating, a fine portrait of a psyche on the edge . . . although there's plenty of room for beauty in the writing, the quick-fire structure ramps up the pace, and there is an exciting precision and perceptiveness at work

• Bookseller, Editor's Choice for July

  Sims creates a compelling narrator, who is both sympathetic and disturbing

• New Statesman

  A short, sharp breath of air . . . Built like a thriller (I tore through it in a day), its impact comes less from grand narrative twists than a queasily forensic examination of one woman's disintegrating life and mind . . . this is a novel I had been craving: an unflinching portrayal of women looking upon each other as disturbingly as men do

• Red magazine

  A slim novel that has maximum drama

• Metro

  [A] slick, smart novella. . . cleverly explores the porous borders between life and the imagination. A head-rush novel that explores ideas about femininity and desirability via a thriller-style plot

• Heat

  Written with a precise, sinister elegance, this is a gripping portrait of one woman's descent into madness

• Woman's Weekly

  A gripping and multilayered novel

• Big Issue

  Taut, compelling and packed with memorable phrases. It sings like a perfectly tuned piano