Your Love is Not Good

An artist of colour becomes obsessed a white model in a novel with the glamour of Clarice Lispector and the viscerality of Han Kang.

Falling in lust with a gorgeous white model could be a great career move for a Korean American painter, unless it's the surest route to self-destruction. Your Love Is Not Good is a queer, dark-hearted satire of the glamour and ugliness of the art world—wrapped in a novel of uncommon punk elegance.

At an otherwise forgettable party in Los Angeles, a queer Korean American painter spots a woman who instantly controls the room: gorgeous and distant and utterly white, the centre of everyone’s attention. She wants Hanne, or wants to be her, or to sully her, or destroy her, or consume her, or some confusion of all the above. Since she’s an artist, she will use art to get closer to Hanne, beginning a series of paintings with her new muse as model.

Your Love Is Not Good stuffs queer explosive into the cracks between identity and aspiration, between desire and art, and revels in the raining debris.

‘Impassioned, wry, compassionate, and hell-raising, this novel illuminates its frangible but resilient world the way a painter uses color on canvas to illuminate the focal point of her vision – building layer after layer of meaning until the image appears as if it has always been there for us to see. A resplendent and fearless book. Must read.’ Kirkus starred review