Description

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD 2024
LONGLISTED FOR THE NOTA BENE PRIZE 2024

The radical, joyful follow-up to the Goldsmiths Prize-winning Sterling Karat Gold.

This is the story of Corey Fah, a writer on the cusp of a windfall, courtesy of the Social Evils prize committee, for whom the actual gong – and with it the prize money – remains tantalizingly out of reach.

Neon beige, with UFO-like qualities, the elusive trophy leads Corey, with partner Drew and surprise eight-legged companion Bambi Pavok, on a spectacular detour through their childhood in the Forest – via an unlikely stint on reality TV. Navigating those twin horrors, through wormholes and time loops, Corey learns – the hard way – the difference between a prize and a gift.

Both radiant and revolutionary, Isabel Waidner’s fiction gleefully takes a hammer to false binaries, boundaries and borders, turning walls into bridges and words into wings. Fierce, fluid and funny, they free us to imagine another way of being.

This is a novel about coming into one’s own, the labour of love, the tendency of history to repeat itself and the pitfalls of social mobility. It’s about watching TV with your lover.

‘A head-spinning, mind-bending roller coaster of fun, horror, and subversion. I love it’ Kamila Shamsie

‘Reading Waidner is like plugging into an electric socket of language and ideas’ Guardian

Publisher Review

[The] writer everyone is talking about . . . and deservedly so . . . Their explosive sensibility and style are as far removed from mediocre prose and middle-class manners as you can imagine -- Bernardine Evaristo Buckle up! Corey Fah Does Social Mobility is a head-spinning, mind-bending roller coaster of fun, horror, and subversion. I love it -- Kamila Shamsie With each book, they get better and better. Corey Fah Does Social Mobility is that rare thing: An authentically radical novel that is joyful and hilarious -- Merve Emre Waidner's original prose spins fantastical imagery with social commentary * Frieze *