Hoby is so good at unpacking all the strange dynamics at work in sex and desire (Emma Cline, author of THE GIRLS)This book pulses with the sticky heat of summer and sex and power and desire ... a deliriously beautiful tale (Nylon)A radiant first novel with antecedents in the great novels of the 1970s: Renata Adler's Speedboat, Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays (New York Times)A gorgeously vibrant story about the thrill and adventure of finding yourself in a new city (Esquire)Hoby's descriptive language is spectacular, like that of Elif Batuman with a freer spirit or Eve Babitz if she were writing about the opposite coast ... The book is irresistible (Los Angeles Review of Books)Highly propulsive reading (Booklist)Captivating (Elle)Beautifully written (Sunday Times Magazine)Hoby's skill on the sentence level - along with a keen eye for detail - will catapult her to stardom (Chicago Review of Books)In language so vivid that readers could break a sweat in an igloo, debut novelist Hoby brings to life the seamy underworld of bright, bored people during a suffocating New York City summer, demonstrating the sure hand seen in works by Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz (Library Journal)

'What do you get when a writer of extreme intelligence, insight, style and beauty chronicles the lives of self-absorbed hedonists - The Great Gatsby, Bright Lights, Big City, and now Neon in Daylight. Hermione Hoby held me spellbound' Ann Patchett, author of COMMONWEALTH

'Hoby is so good at unpacking all the strange dynamics at work in sex and desire' Emma Cline, author of THE GIRLS

'The perfect book with which to while away those hot summer nights' Independent 'Expect Gatsby-esque hedonism and lyricism' Evening Standard 'You will be transfixed' The Pool'Smart, shimmering ... glinting with pocketable images and insights ... A vibrant rush of a novel' Observer

A New York summer so hot the air is turning yellow.

Kate, a young woman newly arrived from London, is determined to become the kind of person who is up for it and down for it - and not remotely troubled over how those two semantically opposed phrases could have come to mean the same thing.

In the sweltering city, she encounters Bill, a once-lauded now booze-sodden novelist, and Inez, his teenage daughter who makes extra cash catering to the sexual fantasies of men she has met online - and falls into a complex infatuation with them both.