Women: A Novella

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A Most Anticipated Pride Read by Autostraddle, Electric Literature, and GO Magazine - One of Cosmopolitan UK's Best Erotic Novels of All Time

"Brief, sharp, and utterly consuming. . . Like your first love, it lingers long after the final chapter." - Tegan Quin

A "delightfully frenetic cult classic" (The Atlantic) that intimately explores one young writer's whirlwind and whiplash affair as she falls deeply in love with a woman for the first time.

Sometimes I wonder what it is I could tell you about her for my job here to be done. I am looking for a short-cut. . . .But that would be asking too much from you. It wasn't you who loved her.

A young writer moves from the country to the city and falls in love with another woman for the very first time. From the start, the relationship is doomed; Finn is nineteen years older, wears men's clothes, has a cocky smirk of a smile . . . and a long-term girlfriend.

With startling clarity and breathtaking tenderness, Chloé Caldwell writes the story of a love in reverse: of nights spent drunkenly hurling a phone against a brick wall; of early mornings hungover in bed, curled up together; of emails and poems exchanged at breakneck speed. In Women, Caldwell lays bare the fierce obsession of addictive love, and asks the question: what, if anything, can who we love teach us about who we are?

In this beautiful, transcendent, bracingly sexy novella, Caldwell tells a lust-love story that will bring you to your knees. Capturing the feverish heartbreak of Sapphic romance, painting a stark picture of an identity in crisis, and illuminating the exploratory possibilities of queer life, Women brands the heart and sears the soul.

Chloe Caldwell is the author of The Red Zone, the essay collection I'll Tell You in Person, Legs Get Led Astray, and the forthcoming Trying. Chloe's essays have appeared in the New York Times, Bon Appétit, New York magazine's The Cut and The Strategist, Buzzfeed, Longreads, Vice, Nylon, and many more, as well as half a dozen anthologies including Goodbye To All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving NYC and Without A Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class, and Sluts. Her essay "Hungry Ghost" was listed as Notable in 2018 Best American Nonrequired Reading. She lives in Hudson, New York.