Crudo
02 May 2019Synopsis
'I couldn't put it down' – Sally Rooney, author of Normal People
Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It’s the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart.
Kathy spends the first summer of her forties trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment – marriage. But it’s not only Kathy who is changing. Political, social and natural landscapes are all in peril. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is hotting up. Is it really worth learning to love when the end of the world is nigh? And how do you make art, let alone a life, when it could all end at any moment?
From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a politically-paralysed UK, Olivia Laing's first novel is a love letter, inspired by the life and work of Kathy Acker. It is a blistering rewire of the form and a brilliant, funny and emphatically raw account of love in the apocalypse.
'[Crudo] will blow you away' – Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk
Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the Goldsmith's Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize
Details
02 May 2019
9781509892846Reviews
Written at a war-mongering time of rising nationalisms, the vitality of Olivia Laing's
Deborah Levy
questioning love letter to life and to art will blow you away
Laing’s prose shimmers and is selfish then, suddenly, full of love. It’s a high-wire act. This is the novel as a love letter to Acker. She gives her a happier ending than the one she had. She asks us what a novel can do when unreality rules. She asks what it is like to be alive when the old order is dying . . . Crudo is a hot, hot book. The fuse is lit.Susanne Moore, Observer
The status beach read of the summerSunday Times Style
Finally, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the day I spent reading Olivia Laing’s Crudo. I couldn’t put it down, and then it overwhelmed me so much I had to put it down, and then I had to pick it back up again. A beautiful, strange, intelligent novel.Sally Rooney, author of Conversations With Friends
