Description

Set in what may be the future, and centred on six women sharing a space in some sort of crumbling apartment tower, Ruins, Child is remarkable for its irresistible sweep, wit, and prickly splintered truth. Giada Scodellaro’s novel is like a precious old mirror: dropped, looking up at you, flashing light and bits of the undeniable. With the pulsating sway of its liquid mosaic narrative, the novel may recall Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, but is entirely its own animal: kaleidoscopic, pointedly disorienting in its looseness, and powered along by snatches of speech from its compelling ensemble cast, often vernacular, often overheard. It’s a book seemingly drawn from deep wells of Black American reality: Scodellaro’s female protagonists push back against authority in the very vivacity of their telling, setting afoot a freeing-up and a mysterious inversion of marginalization. A surreal musing, Ruins, Child uses the lens of urban infrastructure, social commentary, folklore, choreography and collective listening to create an ethnography of place and an ode to communal ruins.

Publisher Review

‘Giada Scodellaro’s newest masterpiece, Ruins, Child, endows the concept and form of the contemporary novel with new force and meaning. Cinematic and prismatic, like a camera constantly in motion and yet incisive in its close portraitures of a community of Black women and femmes surviving and living amidst the future urban, eco-dystopic, queer ruins of our society, Scodellaro’s novel breaks new ground in spectacular fashion.’

– John Keene, author of Counternarratives ‘Giada Scodellaro is one of the most astonishing writers of her generation and Ruins, Child is a visionary novel. Scodellaro refracts and redefines the canon of Black culture, the archive of Black experience. The result is a masterpiece that lives and breathes on the page, every sentence shimmering with wit, musicality, brilliance and verve.’

– Katie Kitamura, author of Audition ‘Ruins, Child reads like wild and textured wind, like seeds dispersed, like focus pulled then blossomed outwards, like bodies leaking, thumping, persisting, cleaving: together, then apart. This is a book of breath and people, of the precious metrics of language with all its lakes and tales that flows between and towards women. Giada Scodellaro has written fierce magic, wet earth, hot limbs; it is urgent and beautiful.’

– Helen Marten, author of The Boiled in Between ‘Scodellaro’s brilliant prose breathes strangely. She captures and conjures a world and a set of characters so unlike anything I’ve ever encountered before, and there’s a quiet terror furring beneath the story.’

– Mona Arshi, author of Somebody Loves You ‘Ruins, Child takes us to the crumbling architecture of a future past; a future past that is possibly now. In this work of fractal seeing, we encounter women in lives that are simultaneously lived, reenacted, and observed. Ruins, Child is conceptually rich, prismatic, and choral, embodied, and surreal, cinematic and textual. Giada Scodellaro writes us Black life watching Black life.’

– Dionne Brand, author of A Map to the Door of No Return ‘Riveting, evocative, written with intensity and purpose, these potent, self-contained fictions have a vitality all their own – and they announce the arrival of a brilliant new voice in literature.’

– Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun (praise for Some of Them Will Carry Me) ‘In Some of Them Will Carry Me, Giada Scodellaro enthralls as she evokes the best of the lushly slow and quiet European films of the 1960s, with their long, wide, starkly gorgeous shots, deeply detached yet viscerally sensual plotlines, and lonely meandering figures crossing landscapes. But what is more powerful is how she reorganizes those canonized spaces to foreground the subject-ness of brown bodies and to imbue her female characters with volition. It’s a virtuosic reframing, done with seductive and disarming brevity. A stunning debut.’

– Renee Gladman, author of My Lesbian Novel (praise for Some of Them Will Carry Me) ‘Scodellaro debuts with a wild and wonderful collection of surreal and enigmatic accounts of sex, relationships, and encounters with strangers…. It’s an auspicious and consistently surprising first outing.’

– Publishers Weekly, starred review (praise for Some of Them Will Carry Me)