In an isolated cabin on the California coast, a writer's obsession with a lithe conservatory dropout takes a dangerous turn. A knockout of a debut from a brilliant 21-year-old newcomer.

The first thing Leif notices about Oola is the sharp curve of her delicate shoulders, tensed as if for flight. Even from that first encounter at a party in a flat outside of London, there's something charged, electric about the way Oola, a music school dropout, connects with the cossetted, listless drifter of a narrator we find in 25-year-old Leif. In love, infatuated, the two hit the road across Europe, house-sitting for Leif's parents' wealthy friends and finally settling for the summer in Big Sur. Left to their own devices, a project begins. Leif makes Oola his subject: He will attempt an infinitesimal cartography of her every thought and gesture, her every dimple, every snag, every swell of memory and hollow. And yet in this atmosphere of stifling and paranoid isolation, the world around Leif and Oola begins to warp - the tap water turns salty, plants die, and Oola falls dangerously ill. Finally it becomes clear that the currents surging just below the surface of Leif's story are infinitely stranger than they first appear.

Oola is a mind-bendingly original audiobook about the way that - particularly in the changeable, unsteady just-postcollege years - sex, privilege, desire, and creativity can bend, blur, and break. In an audiobook that sounds like the wicked love child of American Psycho and Lolita, Brittany Newell bursts into the literary world with a narrative as twisted and fresh as it is addicting.