Empathy: Little Sister’s Classics #5

This is a subtly transgressive novel about identity, sexual politics and self-esteem. This is a beautifully written novel about the fluidity of desire, and how people damaged by love can still be transformed by it. Provocative, observant and daring, this 1992 novel by one of America’s pre-eminent lesbian writers and thinkers is being reissued for the first Little Sisters Classics series. Anna O is a loner in New York, an office temp obsessed with a mysterious woman in white leather; Doc is a post-Freudian psychiatrist who hands out business cards to likely neurotics on street corners and is looking for his own personal fulfilment. They befriend each other in the netherworld of the Lower East Side, two unlikely people drawn together by their confusion about and empathy for the world around them and each other.