Description

‘raw as well as wrought … a novel of spaces and gaps … like life poured into art’ – Anthony Cummins, The Observer

‘In both its open-throated exclamations and its concentrated meditations on myriad forms of pain and joy […] Kit reaches places other books don’t.’ – Max Porter

‘An extraordinary experience … It is work and voices like Megan’s we have to fight for.’ – Maxine Peake

Megan and Kit met in their early twenties. Their friendship was intense, wild and true.

Years later, when Kit becomes desperately unwell, Megan tries to pull her old friend back from the precipice, navigating the difficulties of revisiting a relationship conceived in the great freedom of youth, whilst attempting to remain fully present in the messy beauty of her family life.

Kit is a story of the sumptuous complication – and precariousness – of life and relationships. It describes a call to intimacy in a state of emergency. It is a story of one life disrupted as another moves toward its end.

Told in a spare, winding prose-poem, with a voice reminiscent of Max Porter, Elizabeth Smart, Kae Tempest and Rebecca Watson, Kit is a splintered, powerful work of empathy, friendship and unconditional love.

Publisher Review

An extraordinary experience. The richness, rhythm and power of the language pulls you in, down and along. Megan’s voice is totally unique: ethereal, yet completely relatable and grounded. It’s a mirror to a female existence. You feel deeply connected to the narrator’s journey, but it’s also a challenging piece. Completely invigorating. It is work and voices like Megan’s we have to fight for. * Maxine Peake * In both its open-throated exclamations and its concentrated meditations on myriad forms of pain and joy, it searches for a loving root system and finds it working away beautifully in our everyday wreckages […] Kit reaches places other books don’t. * Max Porter * This beautiful, unflinching book asks us what it might mean to truly confront loss – its shame, its intimacies, its clarifying horrors, the ways it forces us to relearn how to live. * Keiran Goddard, author of Hourglass * Megan Barker’s Kit is a timeless classic, the language is compelling and succinct, there is tenderness captured in here and a fierce heart too. This book is so exquisite and so daring – I loved every page. * Salena Godden * ‘Kit is love and pain distilled: a book of extraordinary force. It left me reeling for days’ * Tom Bullough, author of Addlands * Extraordinary […] It is a “poultice of words” – something that brings feeling to the surface. It bears witness to death, and how the living live with it. * Padraig O Tuama, editor of Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World * If I put it down for a moment on almost every page it was only to steady myself, or to savour, or marvel, and occasionally (thank God) to laugh. I can’t wait to read it again. * Sue Peebles, author of Snake Road *