Open Wide
  • Published: 7 August 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529957389
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $38.00

Open Wide

  • Jessica Gross
Formats & editions
Hardback
11 Nov 2025
EBook
7 Aug 2025
Audiobook
7 Aug 2025
Pre-order from…
Apple Books Audible Google Play Kobo Libro.fm

A genre- and boundary-pushing novel about just how far we’ll go to get close to our partners

Olive just wants people to open up. As a radio host, she interviews writers about their works-in-progress, probing for insight; as a friend and a sister, she’s hungry for closeness. She has a habit of recording people without their knowledge, just to hear the world reflected back at her. Olive is approaching her mid-thirties, coddled by her mother and perpetually single, when she meets Theo. He’s a surgeon – he literally cuts people open, which fascinates her – and, with a quick wit and a charming gap between his two front teeth, he seems to adore her. Theo relishes her curious mind, upending everything she’s come to expect from men.

They fall for each other quickly, dizzyingly, but Olive can’t get enough. She struggles to comprehend where she stops and Theo begins. As their relationship intensifies, so does Olive’s resentment of the physical and emotional boundaries between them. So she tests those boundaries: first by recording their conversations, then by recording their sex. Next, on a night there’s no coming back from, she unzips his body and nestles between his organs while he sleeps. Once she starts, she can’t stop – and as she climbs inside Theo, Olive has some disturbing revelations about intimacy, trust, and her own long-repressed memories.

Funny, sexy, razor-sharp and deliciously unsettling, Open Wide pushes the boundaries of genre and it might just push you, too. This absurdist and devastatingly vulnerable novel is for anyone who craves an intimacy they can’t quite reach, taking our fear and craving for connection to new heights.
  • Published: 7 August 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529957389
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $38.00
Categories:

Praise for Open Wide

Strange, ominous and darkly alluring, Open Wide teases the line between intimacy and possession – and what it really means to have "all" of someone. Absolutely gripping. I couldn’t put it down

Peng Shepherd, author of The Cartographers

I lost count of the emotions that gripped me while reading Open Wide. No one writes harrowing, wild, authentic, bordering-on-criminal obsession (love?) like Jessica Gross

Marie-Helene Bertino, author of Beautyland

Sexy and smart, Open Wide is a modern fairy tale about obsessive love. Jessica Gross is a storyteller of extraordinary ability. The end is stunning

Luis Jaramillo, author of The Witches of El Paso

A wild ride, smart, unsettling, sexy and hilarious. The impossible development at the heart of the narrative is captivating, as is Olive herself - and while I thought of Kafka and Gogol as I read, the truth is that this novel is a true, electrifying original

Clare Beams, author of The Garden and The Illness Lesson

Bad boundaries have never been so uncomfortably delicious, and Jessica Gross goes all in. This clever, provocative tale of the dream and horror of closeness has guts - a lot of them. Climb inside!

Megan Milks

Open Wide grabs you by the throat and refuses to let go—a deliciously unnerving exploration of love's darkest extremes. Gross’s smartly comedic novel dissects our deepest fears about intimacy and belonging with unflinching precision. This is psychological horror at its most inventive—a startling, original work that will leave you questioning the boundaries we draw around those we love

Chelsea Bieker, author of Madowman and Godshot