Set against the neon-lit porn world of 1980s Los Angeles, a raw and evocative portrait of sex, friendship, and the perilous edge of liberation for two young women—from the author of Aesthetica.
For fans of Mary Gaitskill, Emma Cline, and Rachel Kushner.

Los Angeles, 1982. Eighteen-year-old Jude, newly out of reform school, is searching for her best friend, Winnie, when she falls under the spell of an older man with a motorcycle, a needle, and a taste for danger.

What begins as an escape spirals into motel rooms, stickups, and drug binges. Jude eventually finds Winnie, now Velvet, dancing at a Sunset Strip club. Together they imagine a future—bartending, writing, building a life of their own—but the same world that offers glamour and freedom threatens to consume them. Survival means navigating men who promise love, power, and escape—always at a cost.

Lovers XXXis a cool-eyed re-creation of the world of ’80s adult filmmaking, and a hypnotic novel of friendship, self-invention, and sexual identity beyond binaries. Above all, it is a singular love story between two vulnerable, defiant women.

I’m genuinely on the fence about this one, and it’s hard to explain why. I liked it overall, but it also left me wanting something more, and I can’t fully put my finger on what that something is. One quick note: If the word porn makes you uncomfortable, or you’ve got strong negative feelings about that world going in, this book probably isn’t for you. It’s explicit about what it’s depicting and doesn’t apologize for it.

Let’s start with what worked, because a lot did. The writing itself is beautiful and pulled me in immediately. Set in Los Angeles in 1982, the book follows best friends Jude and Winnie, both eighteen and working at a strip club when the story begins. From there they move into modeling for magazines like Penthouse and Hustler, and eventually into shooting hardcore porn during the VHS boom of the era. Their friendship starts to crack under the weight of the industry itself, the competition and the exploitation all comes to a head with a betrayal that ends their friendship for good. Jude disappears not long after, and Winnie spends the next thirty years without a single trace of her. Divorced and struggling, Winnie finally decides to go looking for answers, which means diving back into the industry she left behind decades earlier.

The characters here are extremely well drawn. Winnie and Jude both feel like real people making complicated choices, and I loved how unapologetically the book handles a young woman owning her own sexuality. There’s no shame baked into the narrative, which felt refreshing. The author also does something I don’t see very often, which is dig deep into the actual mechanics of the VHS porn boom in the eighties. It’s such a specific slice of history, and she clearly did her homework. Alongside that, she doesn’t shy away from how brutal the industry could be for the women in it, especially young women who were incredibly easy to exploit at the time. What I appreciated most is that none of this comes across as judgmental. The author treats sex work as legitimate labor, showing both the empowerment and the real danger that comes with it, without ever moralizing.

Where things lost a little steam for me was the mystery surrounding what happened to Jude. I think I went in expecting more tension around that thread based on how the synopsis frames it, and the payoff ended up feeling pretty predictable. It’s not badly done exactly, it just wasn’t the propulsive, can’t put it down mystery I was anticipating. Looking back, I’m not even sure the mystery element was necessary to make this story work. The character study alone, the friendship, the industry, the era, was strong enough to carry the book without needing a missing persons plot layered on top.

I listened to this one, and Sophie Amoss’s narration deserves a shoutout. She handled the heavier content and the range of characters with a lot of ease and authenticity.

Overall this is a beautifully written, unflinching look at a specific corner of history that doesn’t get talked about much. If you’re drawn to character driven stories that dig into sexuality, exploitation, and the messy reality of an industry most people only see from the outside, this is worth picking up. Just don’t go in expecting the mystery to be the main event.

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