In the Cut

Living alone in New York, Frannie teaches creative writing to a motley bunch of students, and secretly compiles a dictionary of street slang: virginia, n., vagina; snapper, n., vagina; brasole, n., vagina.

One evening at a bar, she stumbles upon a man, his face in shadow, a tattoon on his wrist, a woman kneeling between his legs. A week later a detective shows up at her door. The woman's body has been discovered in the park across the street.

Soon Frannie is propelled into a sexual liaison that tests the limits of her safety and desires, as she begins a terrifying descent into the dark places that reside deep within her.

“This book will keep you up all night and give you chills. Both relentlessly menacing and transgressively brilliant, In the Cut is a twisty, nerve-shredding reading experience. A rare breed of literary thriller that manages to be deeply disturbing, violently erotic, and truly unforgettable.”

A true original ... Disturbingly dark, explosively violent, powerfully erotic and brilliantly written. - Sunday Times

Not a word is wasted in this examination of one woman's sexual odyssey as Moore builds to a shattering climax.

In the Cut resonates anew in a culture sharply attuned to the violation of female bodies ... Moore's deadpan prose is just extraordinary... The final scene is unlike any written in a modern novel... feels newly provocative in the era of Me Too. - Metro

Brutal, witty and electrifying, this is one of the best and bleakest thrillers I've ever read. As stylish as Chandler, as savage as Dworkin, its uncompromising portrait of the erotic dynamic between men and women makes it essential reading in the dark waters of the 21st century.

A gorgeously written, pitch-black fever dream of a novel ... Hot and claustrophobic ... I was scandalised and entranced by its gruesome violence, its genuinely sexy sex scenes ... Thrilling, radical and peculiarly permissive. It also has one of the most stark and bleak, yet beautifully written endings, of any book I have ever read. It has so much to say about the ways in which women are permitted to exist in the world - a topic perhaps more relevant now than when it was first published, and yet, I've not encountered anything like it since. - Grazia

In the Cut shocks in a way I'd forgotten was possible. It is taut and filthy and beautifully written.

In The Cut is surely one of the most underrated books of all time. Moore navigates the claustrophobic streets of a seedy New York and the dark, hidden avenues of female desire with equal grace, rewriting the thriller template with an elegance that proves totally devastating. She looks unflinchingly towards the darkness and finds beauty there as well as old, inescapable truths about what it means to be a reckless woman in a world of dangerous men.

I am in awe of In the Cut, a book about violence and sexuality that pays meticulous attention to language in a sharp, sardonic voice that calls to mind Lorrie Moore and Lydia Davis. It is extraordinarily unrestricted about female desire and sexuality, a completely propulsive reading experience and simply one of my favourite books.

Susanna Moore is the author of the novels The Life of Objects, The Big Girls, One Last Look, In the Cut, Sleeping Beauties, The Whiteness of Bones, and My Old Sweetheart, and two books of nonfiction, Light Years: A Girlhood in Hawai'i and I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai'i. She lives in New York City.

Living alone in New York, Frannie teaches creative writing to a motley bunch of students, and secretly compiles a dictionary of street slang: virginia, n., vagina; snapper, n., vagina; brasole, n., vagina. One evening at a bar, she stumbles upon a man, his face in shadow, a tattoon on his wrist, a woman kneeling between his legs. A week later a detective shows up at her door. The woman's body has been discovered in the park across the street. Soon Frannie is propelled into a sexual liaison that tests the limits of her safety and desires, as she begins a terrifying descent into the dark places that reside deep within her.

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