If The Adult hooked you with queer confusion laid brutally bare, let Sunburn by drag you into rural suffocation where self-deception has nowhere left to hide.
Buy on AmazonWhy It's Your Next Read
- Rural claustrophobia amplifies queer invisibility & shame
- Unreliable narrator = obsessive self-sabotage you'll recognize
- Darkly funny detachment meets forbidden longing
- Sparse prose dissects identity w/o judgment
If The Adult spoke to you because it refused to prettify queer confusion—because Natalie's spiraling felt like watching your own psyche unravel in real time—then Sunburn is the rural, sun-scorched mirror you didn't know you needed. Howarth trades urban academia for small-town claustrophobia, where lesbian desire festers under layers of repression, and the narrator's unreliability becomes a survival mechanism as much as a symptom.
Here's that same blend of dark humor and surreal detachment, but now isolation isn't intellectual—it's geographical, suffocating, visceral. The prose stays sparse, the obsession stays messy, and the self-deception cuts deeper when there's nowhere left to hide.
The self-deception cuts deeper when there's nowhere left to hide.
What Readers Are Saying
"A MASTERPIECE of a debut!" — s.penkevich [mental health hiatus], Goodreads
"As a whole, it's pretty emotional and heartbreaking. 'Sunburn is an astute and tender portrayal of first love, adolescent anxiety and the realities of growing up in a small town where tradition holds people tightly in its grasp.'" — ♥︎ Heather ⚔ (New House-Hiatus), Goodreads
"…what more could you want" — calima, Goodreads
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