Our Cultural obsession with unequal and unfaithful relationship

I am a Fan, is filled with blogs or Instagram posts, mining the darkest depths of seduction and charts the moods and frustrations of an unnamed woman in thrall to a toxic older lover.

North London-born, Sheena Patel, who was chosen as one of the Observer’s Top 10 best debut novelists, uses the story of their experience in a seemingly unequal, unfaithful relationship as a prism through which to examine the complicated hold we each have on one another. With a clear and unforgiving eye, Patel unpicks the behaviour of all involved, herself included, and makes the obvious connection between the power struggles at the heart of human relationships and those of the wider world, offering a devastating critique of access, social media, patriarchal heteronormative relationships, and our cultural obsession with status and how that status is conveyed.

Sheena Patel spins a new dexterity of voice in literature, capable of rendering multi- range emotions and visceral experiences on sex, violence, politics, tenderness, humour.

Her relationship is not so much with him as with the specters of his artist wife and his other girlfriend, whose seemingly enviable lives she publishes on social media. The online world is divided into celebrities and the fans who helplessly orbit them saying “ I am no one. I’m a fan”, and because of this I can be cut out”.

Race, class, and privilege are deconstructed in a voice with authority for belonging to someone who is quite possibly deranged.

I am A Fan by Sheena Patel, Rough Trade Books, £14.99