Like Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Eileen Myles’s Chelsea Girls, All I Ask by the award-winning and highly acclaimed author Eva Crocker is a defining novel of a generation.

A little before seven in the morning, Stacey wakes to the police pounding on her door. They search her home and seize her computer and her phone, telling her they’re looking for “illegal digital material.” Left to unravel what’s happened, Stacey must find a way to take back the privacy and freedom she feels she has lost.

Luckily, she has her friends. Smart and tough and almost terrifyingly open, Stacey and her circle are uncommonly free of biases and boundaries, but this incident reveals how they are still susceptible to society’s traps. Navigating her way through friendship, love, and sex, Stacey strives to restore her self-confidence and to actualize the most authentic way to live her life — one that acknowledges both her power and her vulnerability, her joy and her fear.

All I Ask is a bold and bracing exploration of what it’s like to be young in a time when everything and nothing seems possible. With a playwright’s ear for dialogue and a wry, delicate confidence, Eva Crocker writes with a compassionate but unsentimental eye on human nature that perfectly captures the pitfalls of relying on the people you love.

Eva Crocker is the Associate Editor & Chief Staff Writer at the Overcast, an arts and culture paper in St. John’s. Her work has been published in Riddle Fence, the Newfoundland Quarterly, WORD Quarterly and the Telegram's Cuffer Anthology. Her short story collection Barrelling Forward was shortlisted for the NLCU Fresh Fish Award and the Dane Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers. She has a master’s degree in English literature from Memorial University where she received the 2015 Medal For Excellence in Graduate Studies.

Eva Crocker's profile page

• Long-listed, Scotiabank Giller Prize
• Short-listed, ReLit Award for Novel

There are novels that feel alive. There is no other way to describe it, because words like ‘fresh’ or ‘current’ are not enough. These novels are more than just a compelling plot or strong writing. They do more than tap into current events or debates. These novels offer access to something made animate on the page, and speak from a perspective that feels somehow deeply familiar and entirely unknown; Eva Crocker’s All I Ask is one such novel . . . Refreshing as it is tense and sensual as it is sad, All I Ask is a sharp and absorbing read.

Miramichi Reader

A wickedly funny, sexy, joyous novel, threaded through with sadness, uncertainty, and emotional risk.

Toronto Star

This could be the breakout novel of the year.

Now Magazine

All I Ask is a carefully crafted, observant novel, whose dialogue and scene composition retain an intimacy and immediacy … [Eva Crocker] writes convincingly of the intersection of the personal and the political … A deft, assured debut.

Montreal Review of Books

Funny, hot, and heartfelt.

Xtra

Crackling, intense, and ultimately delightful … [All I Ask] is a wonderful character study and an encapsulation of a particular time and place. Plot and prose are rendered perfectly, and the ending will drive readers to scribble questions in the margins and create book clubs and discussion groups. Crocker is a writer we will be talking about for a long time.

Newfoundland Quarterly

Crocker pulls off an ending that brings the drama full circle in a way that is both unexpected and satisfying . . . Comparisons to Sally Rooney and Eileen Myles have been made, but there’s something in Crocker’s forthright descriptions of physical bodies and their functions that feels closer to the work of Ottessa Moshfegh . . . It is Crocker’s straightforward honesty and forthrightness that is most refreshing.

Quill and Quire