Description

Our unnamed narrator survives in London and Newark on a combination of Universal Credit, music production and songwriting, trying to figure out what she wants from home, and whether anyone is prepared to give it to her.

Navigating love affairs and halted by pain following the loss of her closest confidante, Safe Spaces is a portrait of the artist as a young musician. Of the DJ booths and dances that shape her, and the worlds she finds herself in: be they local raves, her Turkish-Cypriot family, the beauty parlour or the studio.

At once a songbook, a found poem of place, a therapy transcript and a community journal, Safe Spaces is a work of extraordinary lyricism and candour, confirming Tice Cin as one of the foremost stylists of her generation. A deeply intimate portrait of a community and a moving personal reckoning, it fearlessly asks: can the dream of a safe space ever be realised?

Publisher Review

Safe Spaces makes a universe of London in all its glory, cruelty, poetry and bureaucracy. This is a book that evokes the shattering effect of trauma on prose, then painstakingly reconstructs a way to experience life, and talk about love. I saw in it a feat of outstanding energy to keep looking, keep listening and, feel everything in a time of grief, and yet somehow overstate nothing. — Amber Hussain At first discordant, finally symphonic, Cin captures the heavy beat of her city’s blood, its healing music, in ways that recall and update the vivid prose-poetry of Clarence Major and Elizabeth Smart. This is an honest, intimate, grief-soaked work of experiential wonder — Tom Benn * author of Oxblood * With arresting street smarts and vulnerability, Tice Cin reshapes London literature to ends previously unknown. We should all be grateful. — Matthew Sperling After her brilliant debut Keeping The House announced a new and disruptive voice, Tice Cin does it again. In Safe Spaces she is writing at full velocity with her ear to the ground asking all those difficult questions for us: how to be safe and how to love without guardrails. It’s a deeply affecting book with characters navigating a world, with the understory of grief, and executed with a style and music all her own — Mona Arshi Totally original, compelling, immersive and beautiful. I adore Tice’s writing — Cecilia Knapp Fearless writing, language that knows the city from the inside out. Tice Cin moves effortlessly through urban sprawl with a voice that slips between poetry and prose, song and street talk, creating a texture that feels at once intimate and unsettlingly new… This is writing that takes risks with language and landscape, refusing safe routes or easy resolutions… A bold act of literary courage, vivid, restless, and alive to new ways of seeing the world — Jacqueline Crooks In Safe Spaces, Tice Cin whispers a whole world into being; a deeply intimate and lyrical book, shot through with wry observation, it alchemises the cold violence of loss into something healing and relentlessly alive — Keiran Goddard * author of I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning * Being able to capture so much raw emotion through incredible writing like this is a gift. This book conveys magical and visceral energy, that everyone should have the luxury of experiencing. Powerful shit — Lola Young Safe Spaces is a bright and beautiful book, exploring and expressing love and loss, with a tender and powerful voice. Tice Cin is a sublime lyrical story teller, conjuring such vivid imagery with an exquisite and honest attention to detail and dream, with a deeply soulful musiciality and bold-hearted generosity. Tice Cin is a unique and exceptional artist, Safe Spaces a courageous and phenomenal poetic work — Salena Godden Irresistible prose. Simultaneously a poignant rendering of the city’s creative scenes, and a tender exploration of love, loss and our most inner, personal worlds. Safe Spaces is written with an intimate sense of poetry that keeps drawing, and drawing you in. Tice is one of the writers I most look forward to continue reading — Aniefiok Ekpoudom A long song of a book… Cin is a voice of our generation, and possesses an uncanny ability to pen queerness, grief, love, trauma and community with gentle humour and stark relatability of the world we live in today. This book is of the moment – a soulful meditation. You will leave this book and enter into the world changed; breathless, hopeful — Mandisa Apena Raw… Visceral… Powerful — Lola Young A beautifully jagged meditation. Cin’s prose is textured like lived experience: warm, surreal, and suddenly gutting. She captures the poetry of survival with intimate lyricism — Caleb Femi Shape-shifting and form-bending… Sonically rich and emotionally raw… More than just a book, this is the soundtrack to modern-day society — Ashley Hickson-Lovence An elegy, a love song, a hymn as dj set, a poem, an education – I’ll be thinking about this book and going back to it for a long time… Tice Cin has done something incredible here — Ben Pester No one captures the experience of Britain’s working-class, inner-city communities like Cin. I’ve rarely encountered writing that was so faithful and so moving… Exquisite, captivating’ — Nathalie Olah A beautiful and hallucinatory journey through the London music scene. Dreamlike painterly prose is juxtaposed against the reality and precarity of living in London as an artist, I loved every paragraph — Phoebe Stuckes No one has ever quite captured the essence of London like her * Sheerluxe *