I Love You Too Much - Hardcover

Funny, waspish, astute, l Love You Too Much is a heart breaking tale. (Denise Mina, author of The Long Drop)

There’s an elegance to Drake’s writing that marks her out as a writer to be reckoned with and she shows fearlessness as she explores the mind of that most troublesome of creatures, the teenage boy . . . I Love You Too Much is a considerable achievement. (John Boyne Irish Times)

There is the most extraordinary sensibility in this book. It is the author's but she gives it to the reader as thirteen year old Paul's out of kilter, isolated, yearning perception. Denied love, this vulnerable boy floats, adrift, through Paris like a lost, living ghost. We see - and feel - through his eyes, and the experience is unsettling, unnerving, strangely delicious. Alicia Drake has achieved something very rare. (Tim Pears, author of In the Light of Morning.)

The enfant naturel of Henry James’s What Maisie Knew and Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home (Anne Korkeakivi)

Drake’s characters are richly drawn and she writes insightfully about teenage angst, the superficiality of wealth, compulsive consumption and familial neglect in a coming-of-age novel that’s replete with evocations of adolescent loneliness and insecurity. (Observer)

Drake nails the plight of a protagonist caught between childhood and the alarming onset of adulthood, but also elicits a pang of sympathy for Paul’s shambolic parents, bruised by their own upbringings . . . the shine of a very enjoyable first novel. (Daily Mail)

Occasionally I choose to intercept a gift destined for my boyfriend. I’m glad I stole this. Drake dissects a postcard-perfect Paris as the ugly innards of a modern family are gradually exposed. We follow Paul, 13, lonely and lovestruck, as his fragile real and fantasy worlds unravel whilst his mother laments a lost youth rather than the lost child in plain sight. (Laura Bailey Vogue)

A sharp, beautiful novel about the loneliness of childhood set in the most elegant district of Paris.