Backlash

‘A strange, uncompromising study of queer desire, power and manipulation. Backlash was strikingly explicit for its time and remains so; it’s not a particularly flattering portrait of lesbian love – which may be why it feels so modern, and (I hate to admit) curiously relatable’—Kirsty Logan, author of No & Other Love Stories

‘Backlash is a masterclass in how we can become unhinged by desire. Beneath the deliciously crisp sentences is queer longing in its most unsanitised form: messy, possessive, and violently horny. I loved being trapped in this claustrophobic world'—Jane Flett, author of Freakslaw 

‘More than fifty-five years since its first publication, Backlash is still a startling novel. The theme of controlling love in an all-girls school may be familiar to readers of twentieth-century lesbian fiction, but Natalia Zabaneh’s piercingly sharp prose and penetrating characterisation offer something new at every turn. Exploring uneasy frictions between youth and age, truth and deception, tenderness and violence, and love and obsession, Backlash pushes unreliable narration to its limits. A brilliant and unsettling novel, where danger and destruction are never far away’—Hannah Roche, author of The Outside Thing: Modernist Lesbian Romance; co-editor of Literary Narratives of Coercive Control

‘An age-gap u-haul lez-tale written at a time when the stakes were higher but expression was more carefree. Margaret–the narrator–wobbles precariously on the line between grotesque and worthy of compassion; tragic and comic, shameful and proud. I loved the book, but I'm not sure if I loved it in the correct way’—Crystal Jeans, author of Accidental Darlings

‘Backlash is the story of the romantic and sexual relationship that blossoms between two women, told with both a frankness and an explicitness unexpected for the era. Much, as it turns out, is surprising about this book.’—Lucy Scholes, editor of A Different Sound: Stories by Mid-Century Women Writers