Clinical Intimacy

Clinical Intimacy is a fascinating exercise in understanding a life through the shadows it casts in other people's lives. It asks us whether great kindness can be a pathology, or if it is just pathologized by people to whom it is alien. Beautifully conceived and written, psychologically and politically acute, this is a debut of great breadth and power. * Sandra Newman, author of Julia * A truly original literary mystery, and a bold meditation on care, judgement and exploitation . . . Like the best really serious novels, it’s profoundly uncomfortable, avoids easy dramatic answers and forces you to really think and question – yourself as much as its own narrative. An unmissable debut. * Luke Kennard, author of Notes on the Sonnets * Arresting in its originality, Clinical Intimacy impels you through its pages in sheer curiosity as to what it will do next. Ewan Gass has achieved what all novelists ought to attempt: he has forged a whole new way of telling a story. * Rob Doyle, author of Autobibliography and Threshold * Intimate, intricate, emotional and gripping — like an analytic Cubist portrait of a mysterious and charismatic figure, S, who we get to know through fractured glimpses — Clinical Intimacy is one of the best first novels I've read in a long while. * Toby Litt, author of Patience * Voices — craving, guilty, disgusted, devoted — spin around a haunting question that we run after with every page. Through this sequence of testimonies, Gass has shown himself a master of delicate, gutting tragedy. An utterly intoxicating novel of human contradictions and secrecy that stays under the skin long after the last words. * Yelena Moskovich, author of Virtuoso *