Annie moves into her new home bringing little else but her cat and a collection of cow-shaped milk jugs.  She’s hoping for a clean slate, but there’s something familiar about her next door neighbour – she’s convinced she’s seen him somewhere before.

Annie is morbidly obese, lonely and hopeful.  She narrates her increasingly bizarre attempts to ingratiate herself with her new neighbours, to learn from past mistakes and achieve a ‘certain kind of intimacy’ with the boy next door.  Undeterred by her target’s hostile girlfriend, she searches for guidance, obsessively studying self-help literature and romance novels.  Though Annie struggles to repress a murky history of violence, secrets and sexual mishaps her past is never too far behind her, finally shattering her denial in a compelling and bloody climax.

A Kind of Intimacy traces the dark possibilities of best intentions going awry and gives an unsettling glimpse into a clumsy young woman who has too much in common with the rest of us to be written off as a monster.

Jenni Diski hails ‘an intense and intriguing novel that never quite lets the reader get comfortable.  It understands about the fuzzy boundary between the normal and the strange, and weaves them together in a gripping, ever-darkening narrative.’

“who wouldn’t kill for a comic gift like Jenn Ashworth’s?….I’m already looking forward to [her] next novel” – Guardian