Description

‘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

Publisher Review

Chic, compassionate, crabby, perspicacious, and marvellously playful - Crudo is a huge-hearted novel that conveys the weight of the world with the lightest touch - I loved the mercurial energy that flew off its fast-turning pages. -- Claire-Louise Bennett Reading Olivia Laing's short, sleek novel CRUDO is like seeing the (very) recent past through a wall of mirrors. Laing adopts fragments of Kathy Acker's writings and life to arrive at a narrative style that's readable, shockingly new, and surprisingly tender. I didn't want it to stop. -- Chris Kraus Witty, hectic, effervescent, and deliciously derailing, Olivia Laing's first venture into fiction holds up a mirror to our troubled times -- Rupert Thomson 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 that you'll forget you aren't reading about yourself. -- Philip Hoare, author of RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR I am in awe of Olivia Laing's insights, braininess, and that something that feels like recklessness until it lands. -- Peter Carey