Creep: A Love Story

More about the book

From a blistering new voice in dark literary fiction, an unsettling portrait of loneliness, obsession, and identity which asks: if a stranger was left alone in your house, how well could they truly get to know you--enough to fall in love with you? Alice and Tom are made for each other. Deeply connected, they share a flat in London, go to galleries together, enjoy the same books and wine. They even share a toothbrush. It's all picture perfect. Except Alice and Tom have never met. Alice has been cleaning Tom's apartment every Wednesday for a year. With every smudge wiped from his coffee cup, every multivitamin counted in the jar, Alice spirals deeper into infatuation, imagining a love so powerful it might erase a lifetime of self-hatred and loneliness. But as Alice prepares for the moment when she and Tom will finally meet face-to-face, she discovers that love might not be the cure she thought it was. Instead, their coming together sets off a chain of events that shatters everything Alice thought she knew and burns her world to the ground. Told in Alice's compelling, deliciously acidic voice, Creep is a literary study of unreliability and unlikability. Exploring alienation and loneliness, class and race, it's a skilled debut with resonance in the way that we view women, mental health, and the lost in society.