Description

‘If you’re a fan of Sally Rooney’s work, then you can’t go wrong by picking up a copy of Topics Of Conversation … She’s a fresh voice, and one that it’s certainly worth listening to.’ Vogue

‘Miranda Popkey’s debut explores the paradox of longing to assert control and longing to lose it … She depicts what it feels like to exist, actually live, at that intersection, which can so often bring about paralysis.’ New Yorker

What is the shape of a life? Is it the things that happen to us? Or is it the stories we tell about the things that happen to us?

From the coast of the Adriatic to the salt spray of Santa Barbara, the narrator of Topics of Conversation maps out her life through two decades of bad relationships, motherhood, crisis and consolation. The novel unfurls through a series of conversations – in private with friends, late at night at parties with acquaintances, with strangers in hotel rooms, in moments of revelation, shame, cynicism, envy and intimacy. Sizzling with enigmatic desire, Miranda Popkey’s debut novel is a seductive exploration of life as a woman in the modern world, of the stories we tell ourselves and of the things we reveal only to strangers.

Publisher Review

A sustained, Sally Rooney-esque brooding on our simultaneous but conflicting yearnings for autonomy and 'being a vessel for the desire of others'. * The New York Times * Fans of Sally Rooney's Normal People will love it. * Glamour UK * If you're a fan of Sally Rooney's work, then you can't go wrong by picking up a copy of Topics Of Conversation ... Popkey explores thought-provoking topics including female desire, relationships, consent, sex and anger. She's a fresh voice, and one that it's certainly worth listening to. * Vogue * Brilliant, thoughtful and compelling -- Sara Lawrence * Daily Mail * Miranda Popkey's debut explores the paradox of longing to assert control and longing to lose it ... She depicts what it feels like to exist, actually live, at that intersection, which can so often bring about paralysis. * New Yorker * Each of the chapters in this exacting, exhilarating debut novel records a deeply intimate discussion ... Our guess is that this book will be the topic of many conversations in 2020. * Oprah Magazine * A pleasingly unsentimental novel about attraction and repulsion and the fluid line between the two. Popkey writes about these emotional eddies with such thrilling detachment you'll wonder why you ever worried about love at all. -- Jenny Offill, author * Dept. of Speculation * Over the span of 20 years, an unnamed narrator has conversations with an eclectic set of women - conversations about shame and love, sexuality and power. Envy and guilt. Motherhood. Loneliness. The slim book is smart and raw, and Popkey dives head-on into difficult, well - how else to say it? - topics of conversation. * Washington Post * Formally adventurous and blisteringly current, this debut novel spanning almost two decades of conversations between women wrestles with the stories women tell about desire, friendship, and violence * Esquire * Topics of Conversation masterfully maps the unknowable terrain of intimacy * Boston Globe * As she explores her own history through a shifting lens of female rivalries and friendships, the book's surface coolness begins to peel away, revealing the raw, uncommon nerve of a radically honest storyteller. * Entertainment Weekly * In luminous prose, Popkey explores the intricacies of love and desire and female friendship. Every page sparks with intelligence. -- Kirstin Valdez Quade, author * Night at the Fiestas * An intimate evisceration of our narrow imaginings of female sexuality -- Karen Russell, author * Swamplandia! * Penetrating, brutal, a brilliant new voice in contemporary fiction -- Ben Marcus