Oola, Brittany Newell
Oola, Brittany Newell
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.89
Club: $13.49

Oola
A Novel

Author: Brittany Newell

Narrator: Michael Crouch

Unabridged: 10 hr 36 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/25/2017


Synopsis

A provocative and impressive debut delivered with a uniquely sinister lyricism by a brilliant 21-year-old; a story about sex, privilege, desire, and creativity in the post-college years

The first thing Leif notices about Oola is the sharp curve of her delicate shoulders, tensed as if for flight. Even from that first encounter at a party in a flat outside of London, there’s something electric about the way Oola, a music school dropout, connects with the cossetted, listless narrator we find in twenty-five-year-old Leif. Infatuated, the two hit the road across Europe, housesitting for Leif’s parents’ wealthy friends, and finally settling for the summer in Big Sur.

Leif makes Oola his subject: he will attempt an infinitesimal cartography of her every thought and gesture, her every dimple, every snag, every swell of memory and hollow. And yet in this atmosphere of stifling and paranoid isolation, the world around Leif and Oola begins to warp--the tap water turns salty, plants die, and Oola falls dangerously ill. Finally, it becomes clear that the currents surging just below the surface of Leif’s story are infinitely stranger than they first appear.

Oola is a mind-bendingly original novel about the way that--particularly in the changeable, unsteady just-post-college years--sex, privilege, desire, and creativity can bend, blur, and break. Brittany Newell bursts into the literary world with a narrative as twisted and fresh as it is addicting.

About Brittany Newell

Brittany Newell is a writer and performer whose work has been published in Granta, n+1, The New York Times, Joyland, Dazed, and Playgirl. She published her debut novel, Oola, at the age of twenty-one. She lives in San Francisco.


Reviews

This is a story of obsession that goes beyond the object being obsessed about. Leif and Oola are in their twenties when they meet and were attracted to each other. Leif has been getting house sitting jobs all over the world and Oola joins him. During their travels from one house to the next, they on......more

Goodreads review by Pop

Lyrical Nihilism, With A Side of Ennui and Dread Despite the fact that the characters initially range all over the globe this is an L.A. novel the way anything written by Joan Didion or Eve Babitz is basically an L.A. novel. Heck, our heroine Oola's narrative recounting of her childhood could be a ch......more

Goodreads review by Leah

4.5 A dark, quirky, moody story of obsession gone wrong. 20-somethings Leif and Oola meet at a party and he is almost instantly smitten with her. Well, I suppose smitten is not the right word exactly, because there is nothing positive about Leif's attention. It is clear that Oola isn't exactly lookin......more

Goodreads review by Ilana

This is such a fucking incredible book. I have so many thoughts and feelings. I also really really really relate in so many ways to the protagonist (which is often disturbing) and I want to write about this book SO. BADLY.......more