Crudo - Softcover

Laing, Olivia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1509892842 ISBN 13: 9781509892846

Publisher: Picador, 2019

Synopsis

Shortlisted for the Goldsmith's Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize and the James Tait Black Award.

Dive in to a tale of love and loathing with the beach read of the summer.

Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It’s the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart.

From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a Brexit-paralysed UK, Kathy spends the first summer of her forties trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment just as Trump is tweeting the world into nuclear war. But it’s not only Kathy who’s 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 one rogue tweet could end it all.

Olivia Laing radically rewires the novel in a brilliant, funny and emphatically raw account of love in the apocalypse. A Goodbye to Berlin for the 21st century, Crudo charts in real time what it was like to live and love in the horrifying summer of 2017, from the perspective of a commitment-phobic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker . . .

About this title

Review:

Written at a war-mongering time of rising nationalisms, the vitality of Olivia Laing's
questioning love letter to life and to art will blow you away

(Deborah Levy)

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 summer (Sunday 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)

In Crudo her triumph, rather, is rendering on the page the texture of a very contemporary sensibility . . . The novel form famously struggles to represent the intersection in our lives of the personal-parochial and the political-global: here’s a way to try. And the writing is often so fresh and clever and funny. (Tessa Hadley Guardian)

Beautiful and strange, Olivia Laing’s Crudo is an urgent, compelling, funny and moving tale for our times. (Paula Hawkins)

A piece of electrifying writing (Daily Mail)

Electric and unputdownable, its 'love in the apocalypse' vibe is deep and light at the same time. (Elle)

Laing’s fiction debut is a fizzy and thrilling tale of a woman who may or may not be experimental novelist Kathy Acker, preparing for marriage in the summer of 2017. Beautifully written with a voice that grabs from the off. (Independent)

I adored Crudo. I believe it is a great novel. Olivia writes so beautifully about life and nature in both city and country, and always finds some aspect to laugh about, one feels today’s world is worth saving. I also adore Kathy, her whacky, sexy, promiscuous heroine. The story is so funny and touching, I can’t wait to read it again. (Jilly Cooper)

Book Description:

A blisteringly funny and remarkably tender debut novel from Olivia Laing, one of the finest non-fiction writers of her generation.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1509892842
• ISBN 13: 9781509892846
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160