Lovers XXX: 'Impossible to put down!' Madeline Cash, author of Lost Lambs

by Allie Rowbottom

Los Angeles, 1982: best friends Jude and Winnie are eighteen and working at a strip club. Soon they progress to modelling for Penthouse and Hustler, then to shooting hardcore porn. Dazzled by the drugs, sex and parties their new life offers, they are also beset by sexism, bitter competition and the precarity of life on the margins. When their friendship ends in recrimination and a dramatic act of betrayal, Jude goes missing and Winnie can find no trace of her.

Thirty years later, newly divorced and down on her luck, Winnie is ready to face her past. Determined to solve the mystery of what happened to Jude, she sets out to brave the dark underbelly of the adult industry. What follows is a gutsy, propulsive look at sex and power that builds to an unforgettable revelation about love.

Genres: Fiction, Adult

Kindle Edition

Expected publication June 4, 2026

Reviews

[Meike · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really hope the publisher has the guts to submit this rather explicit feminist novel about the porn industry for some literary prizes, especially the Booker, because this is fantastic: Rowbottom tells the story of two friends, Jude and Winnie, who run away from home and stumble into the sex industry in L.A., first as exotic dancers and nude models, then as adult performers. It's the early 80's, and they live through the end of the classic production period with premieres in movie theaters and enter the new world of porn mass distributed on VHS that sets in motion a shift to the extreme. What renders this book so compelling is that the author does not only seem very knowledgeable about her subject, no: This is a page turner with a fast story line that still thrives on complex character description. It's both a thriller and a character study, and I was glued to these pages.

Jude and Winnie are childhood friends, both from broken homes, both dreaming of becoming writers. The first half of the book focuses on Jude who just got out of reform school and now travels to L.A. to search for Winnie. After getting lost in a heroin haze with Vietnam veteran Laird, she finds Winnie working in a strip club and living in an apartment belonging to Brad, a porn mogul scouting video vixens. The friends turn into Velvet Waters and Puss Boots, two starlets trying to make it with the help of adult star Cherry Lynn... CUT! The second half of the book jumps to 2015, and after being separated for decades, Winnie now sets out to search for Jude, who might or might not be dead. Will Winnie find redemption?

What's astounding is that this is a novel about the exploitation of women and porn, but free of cliches. Wait, you might say now, two girls from broken homes do drugs and have sex for money with sleazy video vixen fuck boys? Isn't that, like, cliche to the max? But this text is smart: The characters are so self-aware, their psychological reasoning is so plausible, their vulnerability so palpable, and they are not simply victims, but three-dimensional persons being victimized. Jude and Winnie are caught up in a Gordian knot of troubles, both looking at the world from different places of trauma, both with a different attitude to sex, both with different coping mechanisms. It shows that the author has thought this topic through, has anticipated the readers' expectations, has read a lot of material about porn, and does not think in moral absolutes regarding the medium, but wants to talk about how the male domination of the industry is the root of the problem, and the stigmatization of women caught in the saint/whore dichotomy.

This is a book about capitalism, and how the patriarchy commodifies female bodies - and the text does not hold back. The way the narrative is constructed, with plenty of foreshadowings and puzzle pieces that are slowly put together, adds plenty of suspense, but more than anything, this is a story about love and how the world harms and compromises people. For everyone in this novel, life is relentless and shows no mercy - but the characters can choose to show mercy to each other. Often, they don't, for various reasons. The text also points to the real-world famous men who helped glamorize the scene and lifestyle that victimizes fictional Jude and Winnie: Warren Beatty, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson (I dare you to google these dudes with "porn"), William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski (sex and drugs as material for art, as self-expression), Larry Flynt (protection of porn as free speech). This does not mean that all men in the novel are bad though, and not all sex in the novel is violent, not even all sex that is filmed for public consumption. Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon and their anti-porn arguments feature and are valued, then their hypocrisy is illustrated. The world is complicated, and the novel does not aim to diminish its complexity.

There is a lot of nuance to be found here, and plenty of scenes and singular sentences that encourage discussions and move readers. A great book, I hope it will get the recognition it deserves, and judges and readers alike will not dismiss it because they fear the topic it handles so intelligently.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovers XXX is a sharp, unsettling, and unexpectedly fast moving book about friendship, capitalism, and the porn industry at a moment of massive cultural shift. Set first in 1980s LA and later in the long shadow of that era, it follows Jude and Winnie, two young women from broken homes whose shared dream of becoming writers leads them instead into stripping and porn. Rowbottom refuses both sentimentality and moral absolutism, her characters are exploited, yes, but also self aware, strategic, contradictory, and painfully human.

The first half explodes with speed and danger, the later retrospective slows the pace but deepens the emotional reckoning, building to a sad, earned ending. This is not erotic fiction but a critique of patriarchy, of choice under capitalism, of how consent can still coexist with harm.

This is dark, gripping, and full of lines that sting long after you close the book.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jude knew, she knew that women wanted as much as men, sexually speaking. But they were told to want less. Everywhere but porn they were told that.

Well, this is provocative and surprising from the Virago imprint. Rowbottom has written a nuanced book about the 1980s US porn industry that shifts from the horrific (filmed real-life rape) to this kind of insight into the headspace of some of the young women who made their money from sex films.

By giving us two very different young women - traumatised Winnie and harder, sexier, rebellious Jude - the book portrays a gamut of experiences. Jude is seduced by the money, the drugs, the lifestyle, the dream of making it as a star, possibly even a cross-over into 'real' films even as she knows, with her cynical hat on, that that doesn't happen. But she takes it in her stride, navigating the exploitation and witnessing the fall-outs and suicides while maintaining a kind of protective carapace of her own.

This is a book of two halves and it's the first section that gripped me. In the second part, set thirty years later, we switch from Jude to Winnie as the journeys are reversed and this time it's Winnie who goes looking for her friend. In the abstract this works as a premise, allowing a retrospective by fifty-something Winnie to review her youth and the industry itself - but the lack of pace drops away from the energetic, kinetic first part, even while we move towards a sad and satisfying ending.

I don't know what research Rowbottom did but this feels like a completely plausible story, set against a context when porn moved from movie theatres to home videos available to men to rent or buy on the high street, leading to a burgeoning of the industry even ahead of online.

There is no sentimentality here about the women involved in porn but there is empathy and respect: almost all the female characters have had poor, no-education, abusive and abandoned pasts, and the sheer amount they can earn - a thousand pounds a day in the 1980s - helps us understand the choices. At the same time, the book doesn't pull its punches in terms of the young women crying behind closed doors, the drugs that are enablers and pacifiers, and the way that consent doesn't prevent exploitation.

I would have loved to have heard more from the point of view of the male porn actors: here they are bit players, but a throwaway comment about their pressure to perform, the use of viagra and the anger and violence that might result from their inability to get and keep an erection on film is a whole other story I'd have liked to have explored.

Nevertheless, this is a book I couldn't stop reading. There's an especially pointed comment where Winnie thinks about Andrea Dworkin's work and the alternative possible response to her past from her fellow creative writing teachers: 'but if anyone at the school found out, she imagined they'd consider porn subversive, performative, a punk, feminist backstory to gossip about respectfully amongst themselves' - ouch!

Many thanks to Little Brown/Virago for an ARC via NetGalley

[Chelsea Knowles · Rating 5 out of 5]

*Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance reader copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.*

Lovers XXX starts in 1982 in Los Angeles. Jude is eighteen and goes to LA to live with her old friend, Winnie. Winnie works at a strip club and Jude soon joins her. Jude then starts modelling for Penthouse and Hustler and then she gets invited to shoot hardcore porn. Porn gives Jude a good income and the drugs blind Jude to the reality of what she is doing. Winnie starts shooting porn too but the male run environment of porn leads to sexism between the women. Jude and Winnie’s friendship ends and everything blows up for Jude as she goes missing. Thirty years later, Winnie is ready to face her past after a recent divorce. She wants to find out what happened to Jude and starts investigating which means going over what she did in the porn industry and remembering painful memories of a broken friendship.

When I first started reading this, I wasn’t sure what to think about the story. At first I thought the writing was a little weak but the further I got into the book the stronger the witting got. As I kept reading, I became engrossed in the book and I found the world Jude and Winnie were in to be fascinating. This book does not hold back in terms of content, this discusses the sex acts the girls did in the scenes but it is not erotic. This book is a critique of the porn industry and shows how exploitation did occur in the industry and how it occurs now in different ways. There is frequent drug use in this and it was painful to see the way the girls were exploited. At the heart of this book is the connection between Jude and Winnie and I found parts of their relationship to be beautiful at times. I found the ending to be quite emotional and I developed a strong connection to these characters. I enjoyed the ‘historical’ vibes of this novel as part one is set in the 80s. There is sexual abuse in this so I would advise readers to know their triggers before reading this. I will be recommending this novel though as I think it is a fantastic exploration of the porn industry in both the 80s and the modern day.

Favourite quote -
“The whole Women Against Pornography movement took everything to extremes for the good of no one, just like the pornographers had done. Capitalism won over women, as usual. Porn could hardly be described as playful now, and the violence was worse than ever. Worse, Winnie suspected, than she could imagine, though she didn’t care to go poking around and confirming this suspicion.”

[T Madden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Without hyperbole, one of the greatest novels I've ever read. So skillful. Both smart and wise. Terribly heartbreaking. Sexy, dark, completely unputdownable.

[Tiffany Dyba · Rating 5 out of 5]

THIS BOOK IS EVERYTHING I NEVER KNEW I NEEDED!
A friendship for the ages. Would follow them anywhere. Sexy. Dark. I was sad when it was over. Obsessed.