Give Me Everything You've Got: A Novel [9781250792792]

Overview

“The book of the summer.”—Harper’s Bazaar
“Rebecca meets Brideshead Revisited meets Saltburn.” —Stylist magazine
“A hugely talented writer.” —Sarah Waters
“Gripping . . . a sensuous game of cat and mouse.” —Aisling Rawle
“Stylish, devastating and very hot.” —Daisy Alpert Florin, author of My Last Innocent Year

Hot to the touch, an “utterly addictive” (Colin Walsh) modern gothic about a promising young filmmaker pushed to the brink

In the middle of an unrelenting heat-wave, up-and-coming filmmaker Ruby arrives at the country house of her idol, Ellen. An iconoclastic feminist director, Ellen has offered Ruby mentorship and a room of her own in which to write her next film. Ellen’s home is like something out of a dream—grand and imposing, with sprawling gardens and a shimmering swimming pool. But tension thrums beneath the picture-perfect surface. Ellen’s reputation is under fire, and she chastises Ruby for refusing to turn her trauma into art. Meanwhile, Ellen’s mercurial twenty-year-old daughter, Lara, lounges by the pool under the blistering sun, drawing her mother’s latest houseguest towards her like a moth to a flame.

As her hopes for an artistic summer retreat unravel, Ruby finds herself entangled in a dangerous dynamic between mother and daughter, waiting for the heat to break. Ellen and Lara seem to be playing games with her, and only they know the rules. Soon the house itself begins to feel haunted, and Ruby has the unnerving sensation that she’s not the first promising young woman to fall under its spell.

An incendiary fever dream of a novel set during one sun-bleached July, Imogen Crimp’s Give Me Everything You’ve Got explores the dark corners of ambition, exploitation, and what it takes to be a woman artist.