Lean Cat, Savage Cat

De: Lauren J Joseph

A Talented Mr Ripley for contemporary Berlin: a twisting, sensual, heady and razor-sharp exploration of creativity, fame, desire and the divided self

‘The book that’s been missing from my reading habits: classically glamourous, timelessly seductive’ Torrey Peters

‘An erotic spectacular of self-creation and spiralling disintegration’ Olivia Laing
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Charli has finished art school and now has no idea what to do with her life. She’s broke, disillusioned and her flatmates hate her. One night at a bar in Soho, however, everything changes when she first encounters the charismatic musician Alexander Geist. Androgynous, glamorously handsome, mysterious and just a little sinister, he feels something like a soul mate; and so when he heads off to Berlin, Charli follows.

There, at the centre of the city’s febrile party scene, Charli and Alexander embark on their great project: to make Alexander into the biggest star since David Bowie. But Alexander is elusive, mercurial; and Charli is in over her head before she realises just how self-destructive her life has become under his spell.

A story of obsession and excess, doppelgängers and disassociation, fame and the terrible things we do to feel loved, Lean Cat, Savage Cat is an unforgettable novel from one of the most exciting writers at work today.

©2026 Lauren J Joseph (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Reseñas de la Crítica

A dense, humid dance floor of a book. I plunged feet-first into its hot, dark rooms, overspilling with scandal and sensuality. The language is lush and relentless - I inhaled every line (JODIE HARSH)

Even though I know better, Lauren J. Joseph's dangerously stylish and relentlessly sexy novel made me long for wild nights among Berlin’s demi-mondaines: the glittering chaos, the glamour of bad decisions, the drugs and clubs and would-be Bowies with their would-be Romy Haags. I was completely delighted and impressed by the level of filth! (ANDREA LAWLOR, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl)

Joseph’s prose is as sharp as her imagination, as swishy as a pussy-bow and ( when need be) as blunt as a thrown hammer. Her storyline goes for Goth-romance broke, reimagining and role-reversing the classic pairing of Trilby and Svengali amidst the after-dark club-culture of a Bowie-haunted, stimulant-addled Berlin. Erotic obsession, bad drugs , worse decisions - and enough eye-rollingly explicit and gender-fucked backroom action to get anybody’s license revoked. What could possibly go wrong? (NEIL BARTLETT)