Lean Cat, Savage Cat is the book that's been missing from my reading habits: classically glamourous, timelessly seductive, and painfully aware of the pitfalls of styling a life that cuts against the norm. Lauren J. Joseph is a wit and an assassin from one sentence to the next

TORREY PETERS, author of Detransition, Baby

A dense, humid dance floor of a book. I plunged feet-first into its hot, dark rooms, overspilling with scandal and sensuality. The language is lush and relentless - I inhaled every line

JODIE HARSH

Even though I know better, Lauren J. Joseph's dangerously stylish and relentlessly sexy novel made me long for wild nights among Berlin's demi-mondaines: the glittering chaos, the glamour of bad decisions, the drugs and clubs and would-be Bowies with their would-be Romy Haags. I was completely delighted and impressed by the level of filth!

ANDREA LAWLOR, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

For a wild and witty ride of sex, parties and transvestism in Berlin, go for Lean Cat, Savage Cat by Lauren J. Joseph

COUNTRY & TOWNHOUSE, 2026's Best Book Releases To Get Excited For

An erotic spectacular of self-creation and spiralling disintegration: a wunderkammer of spoiling promise that combines the mounting tension of The Talented Mr Ripley with the bleak, exquisite social comedy of Isherwood and Waugh, confirming the gimlet-eyed brilliance of Lauren J. Joseph

OLIVIA LAING

Joseph's prose is as sharp as her imagination, as swishy as a pussy-bow and ( when need be) as blunt as a thrown hammer. Her storyline goes for Goth-romance broke, reimagining and role-reversing the classic pairing of Trilby and Svengali amidst the after-dark club-culture of a Bowie-haunted, stimulant-addled Berlin. Erotic obsession, bad drugs , worse decisions - and enough eye-rollingly explicit and gender-fucked backroom action to get anybody's license revoked. What could possibly go wrong?

NEIL BARTLETT