Give Me Everything You've Got by Imogen Crimp
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Publication Date: July 21, 2026
Format: Hardcover - 304 pages
Audiobook - 9 Hours 35 Minutes
Kindle - 289 pages
Nook - 304 pages
ISBN (Hardcover): 978-1250792792
ASIN (Audiobook): B0FT43Y74W
ASIN (Kindle): B0FMS98N9B
BNID (Nook): 978-1250792808
Genre: Literary Fiction / Women's Fiction
Buy The Book:
Disclaimer: I received an ARC from NetGalley and Henry Holt Publisher in exchange for my honest review.
Book Description:
A seductive modern gothic novel following a promising young filmmaker during one sun-bleached July at a famous director’s summer home
In the midst of an unrelenting heatwave, up-and-coming filmmaker Ruby arrives at the summer home of her idol. Ellen, an iconoclastic feminist director known for mentoring other women, has offered Ruby a room of her own while she finishes her screenplay. Hyped as the next big thing, producers are clamouring for a “female story” mined from Ruby’s trauma, and her deadline is fast approaching.
When she arrives in the countryside, Ellen’s house emerges like something out of a dream—grand and imposing, surrounded by sprawling gardens and a shimmering swimming pool. But tension thrums beneath the picture-perfect surface. Ellen’s reputation is under fire after she’s accused of appropriating a story that wasn’t hers to tell. Meanwhile, Ellen’s mercurial twenty-something daughter Lara lounges by the pool under the blistering sun, drawing her mother’s latest houseguest towards her like a moth to a flame.
Trapped between scorched empty fields and waiting for the heat to break, Ruby’s aspirational summer of artistic retreat spirals into an all-consuming affair. Even the house itself begins to feel haunted, and Ruby has the unnerving sensation that she’s not the first promising young woman brought here to fall under its spell.
Hot to the touch, Imogen Crimp’s Give Me Everything You’ve Got is a spellbinding fever dream, exploring the dark corners of ambition, exploitation, and what it takes to be a woman artist.
My Book Review:
In Give Me Everything You've Got by author Imogen Crimp, the reader follows aspiring filmmaker Ruby's two-week visit to her mentor's country house during a summer heatwave.
After attending Ellen's feminist director workshop, Ruby was extended an invitation to leave the summer heatwave in London and stay at Ellen's country house while she finishes writing her screenplay. But the two-week artistic retreat is not what Ruby expected when it spirals out of control as Ellen and her twenty-year-old daughter Lara engage in a manipulative and seductive cat-n-mouse game that makes Ruby so distracted and driven to the brink. Can Ruby survive the summer games that Ellen and Lara have in store for her?
I really have a hard time figuring out what I want to say about this book. What could have been a really intriguing story was anything but that because of the way the author wrote the story.
Told in the first-person narrative, the reader follows along as Ruby is so taken by her mentor Ellen and seduced by the daughter Lara during her two-week stay at their country house, that she becomes so distracted by their cat-n-mouse games, and her screenplay becomes an unfortunate casualty that she doesn't realize until the end of her stay.
The main problem with this story is the author's style of not using quotation marks when the characters speak, which makes the story really tedious to follow because of the run-on sentences and very long paragraphs. I think I would have really enjoyed the story more if it had been written differently. It was so hard to read the paragraphs, especially when the characters were having conversations, it got to the point that I was saying "WTF am I reading" throughout the whole story, which is really unfortunate because it took away from what could have been a really enjoyable story .... oh well, sigh.
While I applaud the author for writing and publishing her second novel, I respectfully did not like this story, and I wish her well as she publishes future novels.
Rating: 3 Stars 
About The Author
Imogen Crimp’s debut novel A Very Nice Girl was shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize, selected forMalala Yousafzai’s Fearless Book Club and chosen as a book of the year by the Sunday Times and Grazia. her recent novel, Give Me Everything You've Got was published in July 2026. She lives in London.
Note: No author website or any social media accounts, must not want any followers ... 🤦🤷
