Asylum Road

Local Description

Review by Kat

'An emotionally unsettling, deeply affecting novel. Part road trip, part psychological thriller. A woman takes a trip with her boyfriend, it’s tense, she thinks he will end it -- he proposes. Engaged, they visit his upper-middle-class family in England, then her own family in the remnants of wore-torn Bosnia. Equally as cognizant as it is emotionally raw.  The momentum of the novel never stops, and as each chapter unfolds, barriers of gender, class, and politics permeate and pursue the relationship, unfolding into an unforgettably dark end.'

-Kat, Bookseller at Collins Moonee Ponds

Description

  A couple drive from London to coastal Provence. Anya is preoccupied with what she feels is a relationship on the verge; unequal, precarious. Luke, reserved, stoic, gives away nothing. As the sun sets one evening, he proposes, and they return to London engaged. But planning a wedding does little to settle Anya's unease. As a child, she escaped from Sarajevo, and the idea of security is as alien now as it was then. When social convention forces Anya to return, she begins to change. The past she sought to contain for as long as she can remember resurfaces, and the hot summer builds to a startling climax. Lean, sly and unsettling, Asylum Road is about the many borders governing our lives- between men and women, assimilation and otherness, nations, families, order and chaos. What happens, and who do we become, when they break down?  

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