Reviews
An extraordinary, sordidly exciting, fascinating and original story ... biting but archetypal, sleazy and uneasy, dangerous and ambitious
Lovers XXX is Persona set in the 80s porn world - thrillingly literate; thrillingly sleazy
You're thrown right into Lovers XXX and it doesn't stop. Allie writes about desire, survival, intimacy and exploitation with a kind of feral tenderness. She turns stick-ups, strip clubs and motel rooms into a fever dream that makes ruin look romantic. Impossible to put down!
Allie's writing possesses a rare combination of deep compassion, prescient insight, and just plain coolness that I'm in awe of. She tackles the sticky subjects of female sexuality, objectification and desire with a smoothness that appears effortless on the page, but which I know is born from an obsessive refining of both thought and craft. She has put into words things I have felt but been unable to articulate more times than I can count
Exciting and gritty without feeling lurid, and a moving ode to the value of a female friendship. It's a knockout
Smart, sad, sexy, and at times surprisingly sweet, Allie Rowbottom's Lovers XXX does for the stars of adult filmmaking what her previous novel Aesthetica did for cosmetically-enhanced influencers: it casts a humanising spell, transforming the women at its centre from mere naked flesh into something more like real flesh and blood. Beneath all that silicone and slickness, Rowbottom locates a warm, beating heart
Pulsing and propulsive, Lovers XXX is a fever dream and love song, an ode to the gritty places we find solace and sustenance and glimpses of sublimity: cold fries and canned Screwdrivers, strip malls in the heat and diners at midnight, dusk light glinting off hubcaps on the 101