There's drama aplenty in this plugged-in tale of workplace affairs, agony-aunt blogs and female friendship * Mail on Sunday *

Fleming, Mike Jr. (February 13, 2019). "Focus Boards Carey Mulligan Thriller 'Promising Young Woman' ". Deadline Hollywood. Archived from the original on October 21, 2020 . Retrieved March 5, 2019. Focus Features to Release PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN on April 17". Broadway World. November 22, 2019. Archived from the original on September 7, 2020 . Retrieved December 3, 2019.

Clem: 'Just wait for me in the dark alley, I'll totally bring your coat and bag and not just leave them unattended in the pub while I shag you.' Well, really. O'Donoghue, Caroline (2022). The Gifts That Bind Us. National Geographic Books. ISBN 978-1-536-22222-7. So brilliant ... It couldn't really be more timely ... Compelling and illuminating ... I highly recommend it. - Dolly Alderton, The High Low Podcast

Deeply relatable and darkly comic ... It'll have you nodding with familiarity, thinking, laughing - and crying - as you race towards the end' Grazia Siegel, Tatiana (December 4, 2019). "Sundance Unveils Female-Powered Lineup Featuring Taylor Swift, Gloria Steinem, Abortion Road Trip Drama". The Hollywood Reporter. Archived from the original on December 8, 2019 . Retrieved December 4, 2019. The author uses Jane’s work life to draw attention to the guilt and exhaustion that women constantly feel. Her boss, meanwhile, is the kind of man who likes younger, skinny women, “women whose needs can be folded away into cupboards, like ironing boards”. O’Donoghue doesn’t let her own gender off the hook either. From friendships that sour because of promotion, to overemphasis on appearance, “that private, vain way that all women wish they were underweight”.Cassie arrives at the bachelor party posing as a stripper. She drugs the partygoers and takes Al upstairs, handcuffs him to a bed, and reveals her identity. As she threatens to carve Nina's name into his chest with a scalpel, Al breaks one hand free and suffocates her with a pillow. The next morning, Al's best friend Joe insists Cassie’s death was not his fault and helps him burn Cassie's body in the woods. Her parents file a missing persons report and the police begin to investigate. Cassie’s father mentions that it isn’t entirely unlike Cassie to disappear. Ryan tells a detective Cassie was mentally disturbed and likely to harm herself. He does not tell them she was going to Al’s bachelor party. This sets the tone for the rest of the novel as we follow the protagonist, a young promising woman, in a feverish journey towards self-destruction. When Jane Peters turns 26 she is newly single (her long-term boyfriend has fallen in love with someone else) and painfully aware of what she perceives as being her own unfulfilled existence. She works at Mitchell Advertisement where she is one of the many " young women" who work alongside—and often for—older men. When Clem, her much older boss, begins to show interest in her, she finds herself rapidly falling under his spell.

Promising Young Women manages to capture exactly how it feels to be a twentysomething woman in London while also containing a gleefully dark and gothic streak. It's an absolute gamechanger * The Pool * Promising Young Woman was nominated for five categories at the 93rd Academy Awards and won Best Original Screenplay. [46] This film was longlisted in 13 categories at the 74th British Academy Film Awards, including Best Director for Fennell, Best Actress for Mulligan, and Best Supporting Actor for Burnham. [47] It was finalised at six categories and won two awards, for Best Original Screenplay and Outstanding British Film. [48] It was nominated for four categories at the 78th Golden Globe Awards, [49] and six at the 26th Critics' Choice Awards. [50] It won Best Actress for Mulligan and Best Original Screenplay for Fennell. [50] It further received a Screen Actors Guild Awards nomination, [51] and four AACTA Awards nomination, winning Best International Film and Best International Actress for Mulligan. [52] Most of the awards were directed to Mulligan and Fennell, for the performances, screenplay as well as direction, respectively. This starts off like a conventional young-woman-starts-affair-with-older-married-boss storyline but O’Donoghue is too canny a writer to merely re-tell an old, old story. Instead she allows things to become increasingly nasty and sinister – not in a twisty psycho-thriller-y way, but in a modern Gothic manner where some of the familiar tropes become almost allegories for gender, age, and sexual asymmetries. What begins as a kind of Bridget Jones for the C21st, ends up as something far cleverer with a politicised sense of the inequalities which underlie everyday life. Chang, Justin (December 23, 2020). "Review: Carey Mulligan holds the wild revenge-thriller provocations of 'Promising Young Woman' together". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on December 25, 2020 . Retrieved December 25, 2020. Deeply relatable and darkly comic . . . It'll have you nodding with familiarity, thinking, laughing - and crying - as you race towards the end' GraziaAnyway, basically concept is: the heroine Jane, who moonlights as a straight talking agony aunt called Jolly Politely (kind of my favourite part of the book?) has an affair with her older boss dude. This goes about as well as you’d expect. Because patriarchy. Toxic masculinity. The story blurs the line between reality and fantasy, and as Jane's body and mind become affected by a series of mysterious ailments, so does the prose attain a feverish quality that perfectly captures the Jane's fears and anxieties. On the day of her 26th birthday, Jane is recently single, adrift at her job, and intrigued by why Clem - her much older, married boss - is singing to her. So I distrusted this book because I heard it was 'very topical'. And usually that means rushed out to catch the zeitgeist with lots of contrived sermons on The Topic. Also, I haven't read a book about young women having affairs in offices since I was a teenage girl who thought having affairs in offices was unbearably glamorous. But there's nothing like actually working in an office to make the idea of office affairs seem tedious and sordid.