Daisy Buchanan.
This bonktastic first novel from journalist and columnist Daisy Buchanan has been hailed as "Jilly Cooper for the Instagram generation". It's borderline trashy, high-end entertaining smut, a bit like a modernised and grubbier Bridget Jones's Diary.
Violet is a 28-year-old social media whizz stuck in a dead-end job for an art app start-up, adrift after ditching her unsuitable fiance. Prone to melodramatics, she is haunted by a sort of spiritual shabbiness. "If my soul has fingernails, they are ragged, and the polish is chipped." She wants to be known as "the girl in the sexy dress" but instead, she feels like a girl who smells of desperation, or worse, Elnett. Violet has a fundamental lack of hope and feels like she'll never move through the world easily.
Then she meets the glamorous and glossy but volatile Lottie (who beguilingly "smells like hot asphalt in the rain, basil and bonfires") and her dashing but slightly dorky husband Simon. A powerful and alluring double act, they tell Violet they're launching their own art app start-up and they want to recruit her.
Like a Disney orphan with empty dinner-plate eyes, Violet is seduced by their sophisticated world and into their swanky and grown-up home, with its bookshelves lined with weighty Phaidon art books and orange Penguin classic paperbacks. Invited to dinner parties that are a front for lavish and hedonistic sex orgies under the fine and heady fizz of champagne with their friends, Violet finally feels wanted, accepted and nourished. She wants time off for good behaviour. And she wants time off from good behaviour.
With audacious and eye-watering detail, Buchanan - author of the part memoir, part self-help book How to Be A Grown Up and a book about female friendship, The Sisterhood - has clearly had a lot of fun writing the many riotous sex scenes in this shagfest of a novel. It's all here - feverish masturbation, bombastic orgies and threesomes. I'll charitably spare you from examples but, put it this way, I won't be too surprised if some of these scenes end up in the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. When Violet isn't uncontrollably "bubbling over with hot, satiny liquid", she is trying to navigate the murky intricacies and unspoken rules of group sex.
With their quicksilver moods ranging from hot to bothered and after a disastrous group holiday, it becomes apparent that Lottie and Simon have a troubled past and are damaged. They're "so broken they almost fit together and make a whole". So Violet must make a break.
Perfect for fans of Emma Jane Unsworth, Dolly Alderton and Pandora Sykes, this is refreshingly unashamed, smart, and at times raucously funny. While mostly a fun romp about lust, longing and sexual autonomy, Buchanan also explores themes of female friendship, body image, consent, shame and feminism with wit and wisdom, clearly informed by the bracings of her journalism and non-fiction.
- Reviewed by Kiran Dass
Insatiable: A Love Story for Greedy Girls, by Daisy Buchanan (Sphere, $35)