Kiss Me First by Lottie Moggach
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Blurb: Original, haunting and utterly gripping, Kiss Me First is The Talented Mr Ripley for the online age and the literary thriller that everyone will be talking about. Leila has never met Tess, but she now knows more about Tess than anyone in the world. She’s read all of her emails, researched her past and asked Tess for every detail about her friends and family. Tess has never met Leila. But if she wants to slip away from the world unnoticed, she needs to trust Leila with her life. (Picador)
Alex Clark, The Guardian
“From the novel’s opening, narrated in the present day from a commune somewhere in rural Spain where Leila has gone to search for Tess, we know that all has not ended well, and we are keen to find out exactly how it unravelled. But the power of this debut novel, much anticipated after an 11‑way bidding war by publishers, lies not so much in its surface details – in what it reveals about online life or internet groups. These are interesting enough, but largely because they serve as a metaphor for the creation of identity. Can Leila “be” Tess by amassing enough details about her? … classy, frightening and upsetting.”
Tamzin Baker, The Financial Times
“…an engaging and suspenseful look at the subtle perils the web presents to the human condition.”
Katie Law, London’s Evening Standard
“This is such an original, brave idea for a novel that in spite of the occasional strain on our credulity and the odd clunky sentence, it deserves to do really well.”
Lesley McDowell, The Independent
“Leila, while believable, is not intriguing enough in herself and the concept, intriguing though it is, is just not believable enough. Part of the problem may be the pacing – Moggach builds her tale with painstaking slowness, wanting the non-literariness of the prose to reflect accurately her non-literary narrator. But too often this produces a simplicity that defies tension, making it all too easy for us to put the book down and walk away. This is a harsh verdict on a debut – Moggach has psychological insight and there’s a calmness to her writing that is welcome – but I suspect that the novel will nevertheless do very well.”
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