Pure Hollywood

In tales of rare wit, Pure Hollywood brings us into private worlds of longing and danger. An alcoholic actress takes her children to live in ‘a rusted box on stilts’ in the desert. In an exclusive island resort, a young family’s holiday has terrible consequences. A newly-wed couple who, while still ‘newly everything’, fall in with a misanthropic painter burned by love. ‘On the beach, they agreed, their daydreaming was sometimes dangerous.’

Schutt’s sharply suspenseful and masterfully dark interior portraits of ordinary lives are shot through with surprise and, as Ottessa Moshfegh has it, ‘exquisitely weird writing’.

‘Her sentences never waste a phrase or even a word.’ - Washington Post

'Christine Schutt is one of my shining lighthouses. I love her work with passion. Please read her new book, Pure Hollywood.' - Lauren Groff