“So many contemporary novels feel almost uninhabited, as though they are taking place in the space of pure consciousness; narrators seem to be wandering down empty hallways staring at their phones. This novel — despite being narrated in first person by a woman who is often quite alone, alone at the point of near-breakdown, alone in moments of ecstasy — is not like that at all. Through Ruth’s eyes we see San Francisco in three dimensions . . . The last pages offer a different and more satisfying kind of crescendo — open-ended, strange, joyfully loose.”

“A knockout . . . Newell writes about sex work and drugs and what people—some people—used to call the demimonde without moralizing or reducing her characters to grim allegories. This book is, among other things, funny and sometimes very sweet, and Newell gives shape to Ruth’s chaotic life with gorgeously precise prose . . . Real and raw and exquisitely well crafted.”

“A crackerjack novel of a sex worker who comes undone after her ex-boyfriend’s disappearance . . . The wild ride is bolstered by striking prose and memorable imagery. It’s a stellar entry in the literature of unhinged women, up there with Mona Awad’s Bunny.”

“[Oola is a] twisted debut, testing the boundaries between love, obsession, and identity. . . .Newell’s rangy, circuitous tale is a kind of queer Nadja for millennials with a self-satirizing―and satisfying―bite. A dreamy and provocative exploration of sex, privilege, and self-discovery.”

“The narrator of Oola is unlike anyone I’ve read before―but, more important, Brittany Newell writes prose unlike anyone I’ve read before: exquisitely, strangely, and with an electric spark of black humor. I wish “eerily beautiful” weren’t a cliché, because it perfectly describes this debut.”