"Besotted is an absorbing, nuanced debut about belonging, desire, and the frustrations that surface in an atmosphere of isolation. Set mostly in tiny apartments, ridiculous happy hour bars, and Starbucks--all Western attempts to recreate home--Duclos's expatriate Shanghai is wholly unique and beautifully composed. Alive with keenly observed, vibrant detail, Besotted is a love story that pulses with heat and light, glitter and grit."

--Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light

"In Besotted, Melissa Duclos debuts a beautiful, bruising love story that fully inhabits the world's disquieting spaces in between. Her tender, vital community of Shanghai expats are--sometimes in the space of a single, lyric sentence--both impulsive and calculating, passionate and standoffish, at home and as far from home as they possibly can be. The result is an exuberant, sexy tango of a novel, at turns playful and wrenching, that unpacks the ways desire and reality are both closer together and farther apart than they ever initially seem.

--Tracy Manaster, author of The Done Thing