Alice Sadie Celine

Hailed as “richly intimate” and “wickedly delightful” (The New York Times Book Review), this steamy and incisive debut adult novel follows one woman’s affair with her daughter’s best friend, testing the limits of love and ambition.

It’s the opening night, but Alice’s performance in the local Bay Area production of The Winter’s Tale is far from glamorous. She doesn’t have dreams of stardom, but the basement theatre in a wildfire-choked town isn’t exactly what she envisioned for her career back home in Los Angeles. To make matters worse, her best friend Sadie is not even coming.

Pragmatic, serious Sadie and flighty, creative Alice have been best friends since high school—really one another’s only friend—but now that they are through with college (which they attended together) and living on opposite ends of California, Alice would at least expect her friend’s support. Sadie, determined not to cancel her plans with her boyfriend, ends up enlisting the help of her mother, Celine.

A professor of women’s and gender studies at UC Berkeley, Celine’s landmark treatise on sex and identity made her notorious, but she’s struggling to write her new book in a post-second-wave feminist world. So, when Sadie begs her to attend Alice’s play, she relents, if only to escape writer’s block. But in a turn of perplexing events, Celine becomes entranced by Alice’s performance and realises that her daughter’s once lanky, slightly annoying best friend is now an irresistible young woman.

Set over the course of decades—from Alice and Sadie’s early friendship days and Celine’s decision to leave her husband to the radical movements of the 1990s Berkeley and navigating contemporary Hollywood—Alice and Celine’s love affair will test the limits of their love for Sadie and their own beliefs of power, agency, and feminism. Witty and relatable, sexy and surprising, Sarah Blakely-Cartwright’s adult debut is a “heartfelt, smart, and keenly observed take on friendship” (Town & Country) and a mesmerising portrait of the inner lives of three very different women.

PRAISE FOR ALICE SADIE CELINE

“Obsessed! Each sentence of Alice Sadie Celine is chock full of playful irreverence for feminist and gender theory, hip popular culture references, and the wide breadth of what defines female sexuality.” —Chloë Sevigny

“I am literally obsessed.” —Busy Philipps

“The absence of commas in the title of Sarah Blakley-Cartwright’s richly intimate debut adult novel hints at the characters’ boundary-less enmeshment in one another’s lives… Wickedly delightful.” —The New York Times Book Review

“The three unforgettable women in this novel remind me of the dancing figures in the Matisse painting, their secrets joyful and mysterious, their dramas delightful and powerful. Delicious and subversive, Alice Sadie Celine is a mesmerising read.” —Yiyun Li, winner of the PEN Jean Stein Award, PEN Hemingway Award, and author of The Book of Goose