
Soft Core
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Christine Lakin
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By:
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Brittany Newell
A young woman’s madcap search for her missing ex-boyfriend takes her into the sexual underground in Brittany Newell’s savage, tender Soft Core.
Ruth is lost. She’s living in a drafty Victorian with her ex-boyfriend Dino, a ketamine dealer with a lingerie habit, overdosing on television and regretting her master’s degree. When she starts dancing at a strip club, she becomes Baby Blue, seductress of crypto bros, outcasts, and old lovers alike. Plunged into this swirling underworld of beautiful women, fast cash, ungodly hours, and strangers’ secrets, Baby’s grip on reality begins to loosen. She is sure she can handle it—until one autumn morning when Dino disappears without a trace.
Thus begins a nocturnal quest for the one she still loves—through the misty hills of San Francisco; in dive bars and bus depots; at the BDSM dungeon where she takes a part-time gig. Along the way, she meets Simon, a recluse who pays her for increasingly bizarre favors; a philosophizing suicide fetishist named Nobody; and Emeline, the beautiful and balletic new hire who reminds Baby of someone . . .
A brutally funny, propulsive story of power, fantasy, love, and loss, Brittany Newell’s Soft Core is an ode to the heartbroken and unhinged, to those whose appetites lead them astray. It is a hallucinogenic romp about a girl coming undone, whose longing for friendship, romance, and revenge will take her over the edge and back again.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
©2025 Brittany Newell (P)2025 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
"Soft Core is a beautiful fever dream, a slippery, captivating pleasure, a love story stuffed inside a wadded nylon stocking. It’s a novel that wants to get close to you. It wants to bite your neck; it’s the actual promise of a hickey. I can’t remember the last book I read that was even half as tender. I ate it up."—KRISTEN ARNETT, author of With Teeth and Mostly Dead Things
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An honest and self-effacing portrait of a very troubled young woman.
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Left me confused and unfulfilled
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The narration was a bit grating for me, and this story may have been better executed as a more concise one.
enjoyable but repetitive
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Delicious, Savory Writing
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Surprising!
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No point
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I tried to have empathy for the main character but just wasn’t happening. The story meanders. It is more about loneliness, lack of love/confidence and always being desperate, petty and at times psychotic to find it through sex, revenge or doing whatever a man wants. The writing is subpar , overall everything about it except the narrator is mediocre. The underground SF scene is more boring & cliche than anything else.
Insufferable protagonist
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Do Not Waste Your Time
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