R. O. Kwon’s Exhibit follows Jin Han, a brilliant young photographer whose life looks outwardly composed but is quietly coming loose.

At a lavish party outside San Francisco, she meets Lidija Jung, a world-class ballerina on hiatus under unclear circumstances, and the encounter opens something volatile in both women. Not romance as soft-focus salvation, more romance as accelerant. Very sensible. Everyone loves a small private fire.

The novel moves through queer desire, artistic obsession, Korean history, fetishisation, religious residue, secrecy, sex, and the strange violence of making oneself visible. Kwon’s prose is controlled, charged, and highly compressed; the whole thing has that glassy contemporary-literary intensity where every sentence seems to be withholding a knife. A strong one for readers of Luster, Garth Greenwell, Raven Leilani, Catherine Lacey, queer literary fiction, art-world novels, and fiction about wanting things one’s polite life has not budgeted for.

First UK trade hardback edition, first impression, published by Virago in 2024, with full number line. ISBN 9780349013718. Good second-hand condition.