Look at You, the forthcoming novel by Amanda Smyth, was featured in NetGalley UK's Books of the Month, April 2025.
Advance praise
“Delicate, beautiful, intensely moving. Her best yet.” —Claire Adam
“Through a succession of vignettes that quietly build and blossom and a minimalist prose that masterfully illuminates the inner lives of individuals inhabiting complex worlds, Amanda Smyth has created a marvellous tapestry of a novel.” —Chloe Aridjis
“A beautiful, moving, and cleverly structured collage of a novel where huge tectonic plates of emotions grind and move under the surface of cool, spare, radiant prose.” —Neel Mukherjee
“Look At You sinks seamlessly into the reader’s heart and consciousness. Smyth's pared back, understated prose guides us to big feelings and considerable drama… Smyth writes like a lovechild of Jean Rhys. A remarkable novel. I loved it.” —Monique Roffey
“What an engaging and absorbing novelist Amanda Smyth is, always coming at complex human relationships, passions, misunderstandings and loyalties from an unusual angle, and in beautifully crafted prose.” —Amanda Craig
“Look At You uses an almost filmic montage of setting, incident and character to reveal the complexity of its central character. Every chapter has the precision and subtlety of a short story and together they offer just enough continuity to allow the reader to be both carried by the overall narrative but also to be becalmed in the simple understanding of how it is to be a person without direction, essentially alone in the world. The mixing – the editing – of these vignettes is beautifully executed. Worlds open up, understanding is granted, the pages flew by.” —Jonathan Davidson
“Unfurling with an unassuming grace that belies its cumulative power, Look at You is beguiling, engrossing, penetrating, real.” —Claire Kilroy
Look at You hits bookshelves 25 April 2025.
