Cleanness (Paperback)

Greenwell displays an extraordinary skill at handling time . . . A piece of bravura writing . . . A style that is both clinically precise and fiercely sensual . . . Exquisite - Colm Tóibín, New York Times Book Review

A brilliant examination of love and intimacy - SJ Watson, The Times

Intense, emotional and super-sexy - Sunday Telegraph

Greenwell may be the finest writer of sex currently at work. He is certainly the most exhilarating - Times Literary Supplement

Radiant . . . compassion, that supreme quality in a fiction writer, is a main source of Greenwell's power - Sigrid Nunez, New York Review of Books

Incandescent . . . Greenwell has an uncanny gift, one that comes along rarely - New York Times

This book is brilliant - Observer

Cleanness is wise and illuminating . . . a talented writer of beautiful sentences, and an insightful guide to the strange ways people have of loving each other - Guardian

Garth Greenwell has joined the canon of great gay writers . . . enthralling - Daily Telegraph

Greenwell is a master of precision: everyday intimacy is so well wrought that it can feel unbearable to read, as if he cuts too close to the skin - Financial Times

You should read this book because it contains the year’s most thrilling sex writing - Katy Waldman, New Yorker

Greenwell is a great stylist - Spectator

One of the more stunning accounts of sex in literature . . . One puts the book down, and the light feels a bit hotter and the heart stings more sharply - White Review

Extraordinary . . . The range in these stories is part of their triumph and part of what makes their existential sorrow so profound . . . Incomparably bittersweet . . . Brilliant - Ron Charles, Washington Post

Garth Greenwell is an intensely beautiful and gorgeous writer. Most American literature seems neutered by comparison - Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood

Stunning, provocatively revelatory and atmospherically profound. Here is love and sex as art, as pulse, as truth - Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women

An impressive book: moving, radical, both beautiful and violent, unexpected. Garth Greenwell is a major writer, and his writing provides us tools to affirm ourselves, to exist – to fight - Édouard Louis, author of The End of Eddy

So rarely do words make comprehensible the inevitability and confusion of desire and determination as Garth Greenwell's writing does. Cleanness captures the indefinableness of pain and intimacy, love and alienation, vulnerability and sustainability - Yiyun Li, author of The Vagrants

I don't know how Garth Greenwell writes such delicate, profane fiction. Reading this book made me want to sit with my emotions and desires; it made me want to be a better writer - Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties

A novel of devastating honesty and beauty - David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl

I loved Cleanness. It's a page-turning love story if you read it for that; it's a lambent, thought-provoking intervention on desire and others' knowability if you read it for that; and if you read it for both, you'll get the best of it. 10/10 - Naoise Dolan, author of Exciting Times

An unbearably wonderful, eloquently sexual, thoughtful, emotional delight of a novel – Garth Greenwell writes like no one else - Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

This is an exceptional work of fiction, which places Greenwell among the very best contemporary novelists - The i