Reviews
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
Lovers XXX is Persona set in the 80s porn world - thrillingly literate; thrillingly sleazy
Exciting and gritty without feeling lurid, and a moving ode to the value of a female friendship. It's a knockout
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!
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
An extraordinary, sordidly exciting, fascinating and original story ... biting but archetypal, sleazy and uneasy, dangerous and ambitious
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