My review of FOLLOW HER by Anna Stothard: a mesmeric, visceral and compelling tale about the alchemy of subjugation.

‘Believing in Frida was like that grey area in childhood where you want to believe in Father Christmas. I didn’t believe in ghosts or psychics, but I wanted to believe in Frida.’

As a reader with a longstanding interest in the pernicious, covert, and destructive nature of mind control (or “brainwashing,” as it used to be called), what I found immediately refreshing about FOLLOW HER was its focus on how it’s done: how, that is, disingenuous, damaged, and deluded people are able to hack the fragile, intelligent, often troubled minds of others and make them do their bidding.

In our time of mass communication, ubiquitous social media and seemingly unprecedented levels of global peril, it’s an urgent question we should all be asking ourselves. And what better way to start than by experiencing cult life first-hand through the medium of a seductive, contemporary, and well-researched story…

‘Like others who have enterd Frida’s orbit since, in many ways I had already disappared before I met her.’

Fans of Stothard’s writing will be reassured to hear that this, her fifth novel, retains much of the characteristic charm found in, say, THE PINK HOTEL. There can be few writers who do on-body description quite as effectively as she does, for instance, ‘I rested my back on the side of the caravan and caught my breath in the cooler fresh air. My chest was tight and the air felt difficult to swallow.’ Meanwhile, her imagery and descriptions of the soluble, ever-shifting setting - a tidal island in Essex’s Blackwater Estuary, thinly connected by a vanishing causeway - instantly capture one’s imagination: 

‘…from the mainland, all you can see is the causeway, then a mirage-flicker of trees, the beach, the shifting water…The hedges mostly obscured the water on the left but thinned out every so often to reveal sudden flashes of hot mossy shoreline and tidal offerings such as a rotten door or the rib-like tips of what must once have been the base of a boat.’

Plot-wise, the central mystery that drives the story forward is what befell Ava and Grace, two poor teenage girls whose bodies have just been discovered, ten years after their disappearance – a question which generates plenty of intrigue. There are also many interesting twists and turns along the way that keep you guessing, and which culminate in a deeper revelation. Yet, for this reader at least, the most compelling suspense revolved around the complex inner workings of the protagonist Katie’s mind, and the extent to which, if at all, she might ever be liberated from her captor’s borderless influence.

Novels like this don’t solely thrill and entertain. They teach. One hopes that this one will help to insulate readers from, arguably, the most vile and invisible form of abuse: the hijacking of another’s mind, identity, and life. And there’s every reason to believe it will.

In a note at the end of the book, Stothard reveals that at the age of nineteen, she herself inadvertently joined a cult (before managing to leave). This might explain the close insight her protagonist demonstrates, and the highly plausible, ever-present tension between fear and desire that permeates the narrative. 

Pared down, whether we’re discussing healing cults, religious extremist groups or other, less obvious psychologically coercive relationships, what allows people to manipulate us for private gain is our desire to believe their (bogus, often bespoke) messages of (false) hope. Or as the American psychologist and cult expert Arthur J Dikeman neatly observed, ‘Wanting to believe is perhaps the most powerful dynamic initiating and sustaining cult-like behavior'.

FOLLOW HER releases 1 Feb 2026