Crudo

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 Laings prose shimmers and is selfish then, suddenly, full of love. Its 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 dont think Ill ever forget the day I spent reading Olivia Laings Crudo. I couldnt 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 <i>Conversations With Friends</i> 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: heres a way to try. And the writing is often so fresh and clever and funny. -- Tessa Hadley * Guardian * Beautiful and strange, Olivia Laings 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 * Laings 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 todays world is worth saving. I also adore Kathy, her whacky, sexy, promiscuous heroine. The story is so funny and touching, I cant wait to read it again. -- Jilly Cooper Crudo is intensely personal and simultaneously global in its concerns. It forces us to consider the two together and bind our own immediate dramas to those of the wider world. It is an important novel that shouts to the vastness and the urgency of what it means to be alive, now. * Spectator * I read it in one go, lost all sense of time, floating on the rhythm, stung by the beats, I bet Kathy Acker would have loved it, I did. -- Viv Albertine Reading Olivia Laings short, sleek novel Crudo is like seeing the (very) recent past through a wall of mirrors. Laing adopts fragments of Kathy Ackers writings and life to arrive at a narrative style thats readable, shockingly new, and surprisingly tender. I didnt want it to stop. -- Chris Kraus, author of<i> I Love Dick</i> A dazzling, profound and darkly comic inquisition into what it is to be human. To read Crudo is to experience magic on every page. Olivia Laing's writing leaves me breathless with awe -- Elizabeth Day, author of <i>The Party</i> Olivia Laing is a genius - not a word I throw about lightly. It is raw and breathless and effortlessly radical, and having turned the last page I couldn't even set it down before beginning it again. In a time of political auto-satire and the surreal unravelling of meaning itself, many novelists are left uncertain how they ought to respond. This - Crudo - is how. -- Francesca Segal We hereby acknowledge the irresistible rise of Olivia Laing, a writer incapable of anything other than full-on, nonstop brilliance. Crudo, her secular creed for crazy times, only proves her magical moment: to be there in it, and to take us along, too. One long electric dream, spinning with intimate energy and the sharpest saddest funniest humour, it's so utterly in-the-moment th

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. They're the author of several books, including The Lonely City, Everybody and Funny Weather. Their first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. Their work has been translated into twenty-one languages and in 2018 they were awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction.