Give Me Everything You've Got

Hot to the touch, an "utterly addictive" (Colin Walsh) modern gothic about a promising young filmmaker pushed to the brink.

"In her sophomore novel, Crimp returns to the theme of women in the arts, and her hypnotic first-person narration runs together with the dialogue. . . . The slightly creepy, claustrophobic mood is like a gathering storm."
--Kirkus Reviews

In the middle of an unrelenting heat-wave, up-and-coming filmmaker Ruby arrives at the country house of her idol, Ellen. An iconoclastic feminist director, Ellen has offered Ruby mentorship and a room of her own in which to write her next film. Ellen's home is like something out of a dream--grand and imposing, with sprawling gardens and a shimmering swimming pool. But tension thrums beneath the picture-perfect surface. Ellen's reputation is under fire, and she chastises Ruby for refusing to turn her trauma into art. Meanwhile, Ellen's mercurial twenty-year-old daughter, Lara, lounges by the pool under the blistering sun, drawing her mother's latest houseguest towards her like a moth to a flame.

As her hopes for an artistic summer retreat unravel, Ruby finds herself entangled in a dangerous dynamic between mother and daughter, waiting for the heat to break. Ellen and Lara seem to be playing games with her, and Ruby has the unnerving sensation that she's not the first promising young woman to fall under their spell.

An incendiary fever dream of a novel set during one sun-bleached July, Imogen Crimp's Give Me Everything You've Got explores the dark corners of ambition, exploitation, and what it takes to be a woman artist.

Imogen Crimp's debut novel A Very Nice Girl was shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize, selected for Malala Yousafzai's Fearless Book Club and chosen as a book of the year by the Sunday Times and Grazia. She lives in London.