Putney: A Novel

by Sofka Zinovieff

Overview

A Refinery 29 Best August Book • A Vulture Best August Book • An Amazon Best Book of the Month: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

“Zinovieff is obviously working with themes playing out in contemporary culture, but her novel is also reminiscent of the work of Iris Murdoch and A.S. Byatt...Timely and nuanced.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Thought-provoking and relevant."— The Washington Post

A provocative and absorbing novel about a teenage girl’s intoxicating romance with a powerful older man and her discovery, decades later, that her happy memories are hiding a painful truth. 

A rising star in the London arts scene of the early 1970s, gifted composer Ralph Boyd is approached by renowned novelist Edmund Greenslay to score a stage adaptation of his most famous work. Welcomed into Greenslay’s sprawling bohemian house in Putney, an artistic and prosperous district in southwest London, the musical wunderkind is introduced to Edmund’s beautiful activist wife Ellie, his aloof son Theo, and his young daughter Daphne, who quickly becomes Ralph’s muse.

Ralph showers Daphne with tokens of his affection—clandestine gifts and secret notes. In a home that is exciting but often lonely, Daphne finds Ralph to be a dazzling companion for many years. When Ralph accompanies Daphne alone to meet her parents in Greece, their relationship intensifies irrevocably. One person knows the truth about their relationship: Daphne’s best friend Jane, whose awe of the intoxicating Greenslay family ensures her silence.

Decades later Daphne is back in London. After years lost to decadence and drug abuse, she is struggling to create a normal, stable life for herself and her adolescent daughter. When circumstances bring her back in touch with her long-lost friend, Jane, their reunion inevitably turns to Ralph, now a world-famous musician also living in the city. Daphne’s recollections of her youth and her growing anxiety over her own young daughter eventually lead to an explosive realization that propels her to confront Ralph and their years spent together.

Masterfully told from three diverse viewpoints—victim, perpetrator, and witness—Putney is a subtle and enormously powerful novel about consent, agency, and what we tell ourselves to justify what we do, and what others do to us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062847577
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	08/21/2018
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Sofka Zinovieff is the author of four previous books, including The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me, and has worked as a freelance journalist and reviewer, her work appearing in the Telegraph Magazine, the Times Literary Supplement, the Financial Times, the Spectator, the Independent Magazine, and the London Magazine. After many years in Athens, she now divides her time between Greece and England. She is married with two daughters.

Editorial Reviews

06/25/2018
In this incendiary story of sexual obsession and abuse from Zinovieff (The Mad Boy), it’s love at first sight for composer Ralph Boyd when he meets entrancing Daphne Greenslay. The problem is he’s 27 and she’s nine. They are introduced at her family’s house in Putney, in Southwest London, when Ralph is hired by Daphne’s novelist father, Edmund, to write the score for a play based on his most famous novel, Oedipus Blues. It’s the 1970s and rich, successful Edmund’s idea of parenting is relaxed, to say the least. In this permissive environment, well-evoked by Zinovieff, the relationship between Ralph and Daphne secretly flourishes. Ralph eventually marries an age-appropriate woman and has children, but Daphne remains his romantic obsession. Forty years later, Ralph is dying of cancer, and Daphne is a recovering drug addict and single mother to a young daughter. Daphne reconnects with her best friend, Jane Fish, who was a childhood witness to her relationship with Ralph and nudges her toward a confrontation with him over the sexual abuse she suffered at his hands. Told from their three vividly established points of view, and traveling back and forth between the 1970s and today, the novel makes a convincing case for how the anything goes ethos of that earlier decade can lead to a reckoning decades later. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Thought-provoking and relevant.

Washington Post

Zinovieff’s triptych is too nuanced for hashtags, yet perfectly tuned to #MeToo.

Vulture

The characters in Zinovieff’s book are alternatively complicit and sympathetic. The novel manages its hefty load through brilliant writing, astute psychological insight, and the scenery of Greek islands. This post-MeToo Lolita will challenge your preconceptions on every page.

Refinery 29

..a disturbing, well-structured, nuanced story that provides no simple answers — an important addition to an urgent, current conversation.

The Financial Times

Zinovieff’s novel, about the relationship between a young girl and a much older man in the 1970s, and the woman’s present-day reckoning with what actually happened, raises important questions about consent and agency.

Self

‘This is a really important book. I loved it.  Thought provoking, emotionally complex, and tackling the topic of the day - the blurred area between consent and abuse.’

Esther Freud

Involving, beautifully written, and subtle . There are terribly difficult questions here, dealt with sensitively and intelligently.

—The Spectator

The ultimate taboo brought to life in a way that’s thrillingly disturbing and evocative. I couldn’t leave it.

Mary Portas

‘The art of its telling is everything: the reader is duped and lulled and excited, just like the child subject, and yet we are able to understand Ralph too, and the switch from uneasy but gripping romantic narrative to discourse of abuse is jolting and shocking and right.’

Michèle Roberts author of Daughters of the House.

Thought-provoking and relevant.

Washington Post

Involving, beautifully written, and subtle . There are terribly difficult questions here, dealt with sensitively and intelligently.

  —The Spectator

Zinovieff’s novel, about the relationship between a young girl and a much older man in the 1970s, and the woman’s present-day reckoning with what actually happened, raises important questions about consent and agency.

Self

Sofka Zinovieff’s second novel .. delves deep into the discussions surrounding consent and abuse of power. She has written a contemporary Lolita in which the rules of engagement have changed, women are speaking out about the ways they have been misused and the Humbert Humberts face prosecution and disgrace...“A novel that is accomplished, timely and unusually well wrought.

The Guardian

★ 2018-05-30
A novel that interrogates the intersection of love, desire, and abuse.Ralph Boyd, a renowned avant-garde composer, is in his 70s and fighting cancer. Daphne Greenslay has emerged from a few volatile, precarious decades into middle-aged peace. She's a single mother, living across the Thames from the home where she lived as a girl. Daphne is also an artist, and she's working on a piece about her unconventional childhood. Ralph figures prominently in this dreamlike, Edenic collage. Daphne's parents were upper-class bohemians—her father a writer and her mother a Greek expat involved in radical politics—and Ralph was part of their circle of friends, comrades, and acolytes. Instantly captivated by the dark-haired, dark-eyed, and slightly feral child Daphne, Ralph made himself her confidant and special friend as he made her his muse. He also made her his lover. Or he raped her. Zinovieff's (The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me, 2015, etc.) novel turns on the rupture between these two ways of viewing the past. For Ralph, the girl Daphne is a talismanic figure. His love for her is unique and pure, and memories of their trysts sustain him through the pain and indignities of chemotherapy and old age. For Daphne, Ralph is a significant player in a romanticized version of her childhood, her relationship with him one of the more benign parts of her wild history. Then Daphne reconnects with her one-time best friend, Jane, who encourages her to see Ralph in a new and damning light. Zinovieff is obviously working with themes playing out in contemporary culture, but her novel is also reminiscent of the work of Iris Murdoch and A.S. Byatt. Like these English novelists who precede her, Zinovieff is interested in the dynamics of families who see themselves as outside the norm, and, like Murdoch and Byatt, she is concerned with moral dilemmas that don't have easy solutions. Deciding to let Ralph, Daphne, and Jane each have their say in alternating chapters makes it possible for the author to present the full complexity of her subject.Timely and nuanced.

Kirkus Reviews

Thought-provoking and relevant.” — Washington Post

“Told from three vividly established points of view, and traveling back and forth between the 1970s and today, the novel makes a convincing case for how the anything goes ethos of that earlier decade can lead to a reckoning decades later.” — Publishers Weekly

“The characters in Zinovieff’s book are alternatively complicit and sympathetic. The novel manages its hefty load through brilliant writing, astute psychological insight, and the scenery of Greek islands. This post-MeToo Lolita will challenge your preconceptions on every page.” — Refinery 29

“Zinovieff’s novel is a nuanced, thought-provoking plunge into the questioning depths of consent and exploitation. Putney is a discussion starter. ” — Booklist

“Sofka Zinovieff’s second novel .. delves deep into the discussions surrounding consent and abuse of power. She has written a contemporary Lolita in which the rules of engagement have changed, women are speaking out about the ways they have been misused and the Humbert Humberts face prosecution and disgrace...“A novel that is accomplished, timely and unusually well wrought.” — Guardian

“Zinovieff’s novel, about the relationship between a young girl and a much older man in the 1970s, and the woman’s present-day reckoning with what actually happened, raises important questions about consent and agency.” — Self

“Zinovieff is obviously working with themes playing out in contemporary culture, but her novel is also reminiscent of the work of Iris Murdoch and A.S. Byatt...Timely and nuanced.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Zinovieff’s triptych is too nuanced for hashtags, yet perfectly tuned to #MeToo.” — Vulture

‘This book is truly memorable and thought-provoking; throughout, Zinovieff sustains wonderfully perplexing and complex ambiguities. What is love, and what is exploitation? What is truth and what is self-deception? What is righteousness and what is hypocrisy? Can contradictions be simultaneously true?..I’ll remember the characters forever.’ — Louis de Bernieres, author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. 

“..a disturbing, well-structured, nuanced story that provides no simple answers — an important addition to an urgent, current conversation.” — The Financial Times

“A finely nuanced study of the way different people make subjective sense of the past, and a reminder that the novel (like the analyst’s couch) is a great space for thinking about the unthinkable.” — Sunday Times (London)

“Putney is a story about the long shadow abuse can cast on the lives of all involved, but it consistently works on intellectual and emotional levels in order to tell that story.” — Open Letters Review

‘This is a really important book. I loved it.  Thought provoking, emotionally complex, and tackling the topic of the day - the blurred area between consent and abuse.’ — Esther Freud, author of Love Falls.

‘The art of its telling is everything: the reader is duped and lulled and excited, just like the child subject, and yet we are able to understand Ralph too, and the switch from uneasy but gripping romantic narrative to discourse of abuse is jolting and shocking and right.’ — Michèle Roberts author of Daughters of the House. 

“The ultimate taboo brought to life in a way that’s thrillingly disturbing and evocative. I couldn’t leave it.” — Mary Portas, author of Shop Girl

“Involving, beautifully written, and subtle . There are terribly difficult questions here, dealt with sensitively and intelligently.” —   —The Spectator

From the Publisher

Zinovieff’s novel is a nuanced, thought-provoking plunge into the questioning depths of consent and exploitation. Putney is a discussion starter. 

Booklist

Sofka Zinovieff’s second novel .. delves deep into the discussions surrounding consent and abuse of power. She has written a contemporary Lolita in which the rules of engagement have changed, women are speaking out about the ways they have been misused and the Humbert Humberts face prosecution and disgrace...“A novel that is accomplished, timely and unusually well wrought.

Guardian

‘This book is truly memorable and thought-provoking; throughout, Zinovieff sustains wonderfully perplexing and complex ambiguities. What is love, and what is exploitation? What is truth and what is self-deception? What is righteousness and what is hypocrisy? Can contradictions be simultaneously true?..I’ll remember the characters forever.’

Louis de Bernieres

A finely nuanced study of the way different people make subjective sense of the past, and a reminder that the novel (like the analyst’s couch) is a great space for thinking about the unthinkable.

Sunday Times (London)

Putney is a story about the long shadow abuse can cast on the lives of all involved, but it consistently works on intellectual and emotional levels in order to tell that story.

Open Letters Review

Zinovieff’s novel is a nuanced, thought-provoking plunge into the questioning depths of consent and exploitation. Putney is a discussion starter. 

Booklist

Involving, beautifully written, and subtle . There are terribly difficult questions here, dealt with sensitively and intelligently.

  --The Spectator

‘The art of its telling is everything: the reader is duped and lulled and excited, just like the child subject, and yet we are able to understand Ralph too, and the switch from uneasy but gripping romantic narrative to discourse of abuse is jolting and shocking and right.’

Michele Roberts author of Daughters of the House.

Involving, beautifully written, and subtle . There are terribly difficult questions here, dealt with sensitively and intelligently.

The Spectator