Exit Management by Naomi Booth

Exit Management by Naomi Booth.

Published 10th September 2020 by Dead Ink Books.

From the cover of the book: 

“At minus five degrees, even the densest blood materials start to turn: the beginnings of a human heart will still into black ice.”

There is a house, a beautiful house, that sits in a sought-after London location and is filled with priceless works of art. Joszef the elderly owner is ill; all he wants is some company until the end, and someone to trust his home to once he’s gone. Someone to help him over that final line, perhaps.

When Callum, a lost young man longing for direction, comes into his life, the pair form a friendship that transcends their ages. Lauren, Callum’s new girlfriend, has other plans, though. Calculating and ambitious, Lauren has already reinvented herself once and to reach the top she will do it again.

Pushed onwards by the poison of ambition and haunted by losses from the past, these characters are drawn together in a catastrophe of endings. Naomi Booth’s second novel is an unnerving dissection of class, xenophobia and compassion. Showing us the lengths that we will all go to in order to secure our futures, Exit Management will seize you in its cold hands and show you the dark heart within us all.

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Exit Management is quite a novel - seductively dark and with more than a little dose of chill at it's heart, and yet strangely insightful and compassionate at the same time. Naomi manages to draw you completely into her tragic tale of two lovers so completely unsuited to each other that you know heartbreak can be their only destination. I don't think I have ever read anything quite like it before - in a good way... a very good way.

Lauren is cold and fiercely ambitious, She has reinvented herself to get as far away as possible from her traumatic background - the roots that have seriously screwed her up inside. Callum is ripe for the picking, but his close friendship with the elderly Joszef proves to be both an opportunity and fly-in-the-ointment for Lauren's plans, and although in some ways she gets exactly what she wants, the fateful meeting of these three characters proves to be her undoing, while at the same time oddly being the making of Callum.

You would think that this makes Lauren the villain here, for how can you like someone so cold and calculating? But as the story unfolds, you learn exactly why Lauren has become the broken person she is - determined to stand on her own two feet and driven to do anything to get what she wants - and why she actually thinks she is protecting her nearest and dearest in the process. She is both hateful and desperately vulnerable at the same time; a contrary and controversial mix of conflicting desires, intentions and emotions.

Callum begins the piece as a drifter without direction. He is desperate for connection with a fellow human being, for love, and this makes him easy prey for Lauren - even if their meeting and plans are based on misconceptions at the start. But this also makes him open to forming a close and rather beautiful bond with Joszef. Callum's innate compassion is what ultimately brings him to breaking point as his deeply felt emotions eventually spill over, it is also the quality that saves him too.

This is a complex and multi-layered novel, that beautifully explores the weight of the past, class, ambition, relationships and connection with out fellow human beings, and the way Naomi Booth dissects and then displays the many facets of the meaning behind her cleverest of titles, Exit Management, is superb. This is a sad book, and our author leaves us in no doubt that we are not heading for a happy ending from the off, but it gets inside your head, and I so desperately want to know what happens for Lauren and Callum next - always the sign of a great storyteller. Outstanding!

Exit Management is available to buy now from your favourite book retailer, though I recommend supporting independent publishing by buying direct from Dead Ink HERE.

Thank you to Jordan Taylor-Jones for sending me a copy of this incredible book, in return for an honest review.

About the author:

Naomi Booth is a writer and academic. Her fiction tends to explore unsettling landscapes, strange compulsions, dangerous bodies and contamination. Her academic research currently focuses on the literary history of swooning. Her first novel, Sealed, was published by Dead Ink Books in 2017.