‘The murders kept us together’

This is a masterful, wicked thriller about a toxic love affair. Just ignore the creaky politics

ASYLUM ROAD by Olivia Sudjic

272pp, Bloomsbury, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £12.99, ebook £7.59 ÌÌÌÌÌ

“Sometimes it felt like the murders kept us together.” As opening lines go, you can’t do much better than Asylum Road. The realisation, a few sentences later, that it is not in fact a Bonnie-and-Clyde style crime spree preserving narrator Anja’s fragmenting relationship with her boyfriend Luke, but a shared addiction to true crime podcasts, comes not as an anticlimax, but as a further wave of pleasure –

at the sheer audacity of such merciless, reader-skewering writing.

It is the second novel from 33-year-old Olivia Sudjic, whose 2017 debut Sympathy was crowned “the first great Instagram Novel” by The New Republic. That book – a feverish, surreal account of a young graduate’s social-media-driven obsession with an older woman – shares with Asylum Road a rootless young protagonist with a painful, obscured family history and a bonedry narrative voice (Anja’s monthly phone calls to her parents are “as unremarkable as menstruation,” she tells us early on.)

But the resemblance ends there. The world has moved on since 2017 and so have Sudjic’s themes: Asylum Road is not about technology, but

Brexit and a toxic romantic relationship. Written in the wake of the referendum, it approaches European politics through the lens of Sudjic’s own family history – she is British but her paternal grandparents, to whom the novel is dedicated, emigrated from the former Yugoslavia after the Second World War.

She gives Anja what feels like a counterfactual version of her own story: born in Sarajevo in the build up to the Bosnian War, she is sent to Glasgow as a child refugee after the city comes under siege (approximately 14,000 people died, including more than 1,500 children). In the novel, the psychological aftermath of the Brexit vote is beginning to corrode Anja’s painstakingly cultivated, Cambridge-educated sense