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Footnotes to Sex
Footnotes to Sex
Jul 30, 2025 1:07 AM

Author:Mia Farlane

Footnotes to Sex

Love in the 21st century is a many-splintered thing.

May and Jansen are in love. That must be why they bicker and fight over, well, just about everything. The spark in their relationship, or at least the sex, has been misplaced. May, too busy not writing a PhD, decides to take life lessons from fabulously French Francine. Jansen, meanwhile, is hooking up with an old flame, wondering why what might have been is more attractive than what you've got. Into this cauldron of confused hormones comes May's highly irresponsible younger sister, ready to stir things up.

Leading mixed-up twenty-first century lives, May and Jansen need to believe in themselves before they can believe in each other. Footnotes to Sex is a brilliantly funny lesbian novel which shows what a nightmare all women can be.

Reviews

Kinda Buffy meets This Life...it's sharp, dead funny and sexy

—— Guardian

This is dead good

—— Sunday Times

BBC3's best-ever drama... Required viewing

—— Heat

A delightful balance of modern coming-of-age dramedy and horror fantasy . . . If you could imagine the love child of Friends and Dexter you'd be close.

—— Los Angeles Times

Witty, affectionate and unashamedly tear-jerking

—— Red

Enchantingly clever

—— Penny Vincenzi

Honest and beautifully written

—— Woman & Home

Witty, pacy and immediately engaging

—— Glamour

Extremely moving . . . you'll be gripped

—— Daily Mail

Irresistible comfort read

—— Glamour

So fluid, the pages turn themselves

—— Daily Mirror

Tissues are essential. You'll ricochet between delicately watering eyes at the romance of it all and howling sobs at the unbearable tenderness

—— Heat

It would be a hard heart indeed that remained unmoved . . . the tender feelings that Noble engenders in her readers are to be cherished

—— Daily Express

It's one of the best accounts of clever English schoolboyhood I've read

—— Times Educational Supplement

Irony and imagery are deployed with a finesse even Flaubert wouldn't wince at...consummately elegant

—— Sunday Times

Sinister, shocking and extremely powerful

—— Woman & Home

Wonderful

—— Red

Her writing is always thrilling and this is much more than simply a page-turner

—— Jane Wheatley , The Times

A successful novel, well made and written with a light touch

—— Alex Clark , The Guardian

It is beautifully written, and elegantly edited, and manages to pack in vivid characterisations built on tragic family histories... With its strong structure and interesting themes, it could be a textbook example of how to write a modern novel

—— Third Way

Satisfying death-blow to place-in-the-sun escapism

—— Boyd Tonkin , Independent Summer Reads

A compelling novel

—— Tatler

A wry family black comedy, a study in revenge, and an unlikely, if sinister, thriller...a characteristically intelligent, well constructed narrative... The prose is precise and fluent, the tone is neutral, and Tremain makes effective use of the fact that many adults remain children

—— Eileen Battersby , The Irish Times

A criss-crossing, sinuous tale of muted passion and sibling rivarly - and affection - set in the Cevennes. Its peculiar, particular atmosphere is conjured perfectly

—— Erica Wagner , The Times, Christmas round up

A haunting and perfectly poised tale of incest and antiques.

—— Frances Wilson , Daily Telegraph, Christmas round up

Creepily affecting

—— Katy Guest , Independent on Sunday, Christmas round up

Chilling and vivid

—— Charlotte Vowden , Daily Express

Surely one of the most versatile novelists writing today... The scene-setting opening is languorous and beautiful, giving full rein to Tremain's descriptive gifts... A disturbing tale and one rich in detail

—— Daily Express

Intriguing

—— James Urquhart , Financial Times

Tremain expertly heightens the tension in a cleverly fashioned and astutely observed novel that reads like a cross between Ruth Rendell and Jean de Florette

—— Simon Shaw , Mail on Sunday

Tremain's extraordinary imagination has produced a powerful, unsettling novel in which two worlds and cultures collide

—— Cath Kidson Magazine

Tremain writes about this part of France so well because she has known it since childhood, and she captures a sensuality in the landscape that is both attractive and eerie... It is an enthralling book about the catastrophic disruption honesty can bring

—— Siobhan Kane , Irish Times

The novel has all the formal structure of a medieval morality tale, along with its traditional dichotomies: rus and urbe, avarice and asceticism, chastity and lust

—— Guardian

Rose Tremain's thrilling Trespass is set in an obsure valley in Southern France... To be read slowly; Tremain's writing is too exquisite to hurry

—— The Times

Timeless but rooted; tangible but otherworldly. Meticulously plotted, with the musty sadness that comes of cleaving to the past, Trespass will reward your reading time

—— Scotland on Sunday

Rose Tremain's novel begins with a scream and barely loosens its grip amid the sumptuously written pages that follow...subtly harnesses the stifling heat and dangerously feral landscape of southern France to unspool a psychologically disconcerting story of family skeletons and outsider tensions

—— Metro

Like a sinister edition of A Place In the Sun directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with the depth and subtlety that make the book far more than a mere thriller

—— You Magazine (Daily Mail)
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