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‘What a beautiful book, it’s like a hug, or a gentle holding of a hand’ MICHAELA COEL

‘As disarming as it is gripping, The Recovery House is a fluid, bruised and beautiful brooch of a book’ – INUA ELLAMS

‘The Recovery House is a work of the soul. It’s some of the most earnest, beautiful writing I’ve come across in years’ JO HAMYA

‘So rich, emotional and wise, distilling it all into a finely textured work of tenderness, love, camaraderie and human resilience’ COURTTIA NEWLAND

‘I was deeply moved… each vignette feels like a small gift, told in a voice that will linger with me’ SOPHIE MACKINTOSH

‘There are writers who both survive things and understand them. Brutal, precise, and full of light’ YRSA DALEY-WARD

‘I loved this beautiful book’ SARAH BERNSTEIN

A Granta Best Young British Novelist
Jamal, a gifted and introspective young poet, wakes in a quiet, claustrophobic recovery house after a devastating mental breakdown, unsure how the bright edges of his life became so fractured. In this stark yet strangely tender sanctuary, with its watchful nurses, restless corridors and overlooked garden, he encounters several wounded, but radiant souls who are each wrestling with their own invisible storms. As Jamal navigates this suspended world, at once suffocating and strangely sacred, he begins to observe rather than retreat, finding in the rhythms of shared cigarettes, half-finished conversations and midnight confessions a hesitant, flickering sense of belonging.

Within these intimate, volatile walls, music drifts like prayer. A song sung into the dark becomes a fragile lifeline. Psalms are read aloud with trembling conviction. Laughter erupts, unexpected and defiant. Jamal’s searching, philosophical mind moves restlessly between memory and imagination, literature and scripture, doubt and devotion, interrogating the porous boundaries between illness and inspiration. What does it mean to hear a voice and call it God, or art, or madness? What is salvation in a place built to contain collapse? In the charged silence of the garden, under watchful skies, he begins to sense that joy can exist even here, braided through grief, carried on melody, sustained by human touch.
Tender, intelligent and spiritually inquisitive, The Recovery House is a novel about the music that survives inside us when language falters, about the redemptive possibilities of friendship, and about the delicate courage required to rebuild a self. As Jamal reckons with love, faith, shame and the perilous seduction of turning life into art, he is forced to confront the most difficult question of all: how to live honestly in the world without sacrificing the soul that makes him want to write it.

‘A compelling and deeply engaging read’ DANIEL LAWRENCE TAYLOR
‘I loved it’ KRYSTELLE BAMFORD
‘The Recovery House is a masterclass in storytelling. I was mesmerised from start to finish… I’ve never read anything like it and I don’t think I ever will. The Recovery House is perfect’ ORE AGBAJE-WILLIAMS
‘A prescient novel, which captures very powerfully the surreal space and mundane routines of an institution. Owusu has drawn that desolate situation so poignantly’ SARA BAUME
‘An impressively vulnerable novel – I read it in one sitting and immediately went back to page one to read it again’ VARAIDZO
‘Derek Owusu is the real deal, and The Recovery House is his best work yet’ KEIRAN GODDARD
‘The Recovery House is brimming with tenderness’ ROZIE KELLY

Publisher Review

What a beautiful book, it’s like a hug, or a gentle holding of a hand — Michaela Coel I was deeply moved by The Recovery House, how its portrayal of crisis and meaning, faith and human connection is rendered with such precision and immediacy; each vignette feels like a small gift, told in a voice that will linger with me — Sophie Mackintosh There are writers who both survive things and understand them. Brutal, precise, and somehow full of light. — Yrsa Daley-Ward As disarming as it is gripping, The Recovery House is a fluid, bruised and beautiful brooch of a book — Inua Ellams Truly, I think the business of blurbing isn’t fit to do this book justice…The Recovery House is a work of the soul. It’s some of the most earnest, beautiful writing I’ve come across in years – I feel lucky to have read it, and deeply inspired. — Jo Hamya Derek Owusu is the real deal, and The Recovery House is his best work yet; a brutal, painful, vulnerable book rendered with rare poise and style — Kieran Goddard I’ll hold up my hands and say it, I thought Owusu had written his masterwork already, I even wrote as much, but in this latest novel he homes in on everything that makes his writing so rich, emotional and wise, distilling it all into a finely textured work of tenderness, love, camaraderie and human resilience. We’re held securely in his palm for the duration of these scant pages. This is tender restraint charged with love and compassion. This is our uncharted humanity turned to face the world. This is truly us. — Courttia Newland I would like to call The Recovery House a masterclass in storytelling, voice and what a novel should be, but this kind of talent can’t be taught. I was mesmerised from start to finish… I’ve never read anything like it and I don’t think I ever will. The Recovery House is perfect – it doesn’t beg you to feel anything but you feel it all regardless. The characters are real living people to whom you find yourself attached, The Recovery House itself is all around, the doors and chairs and tables all physical things you can reach out and touch – all possible because Derek Owusu has created a story that is impossible to read without living within it, impossible to put down without reaching out for it again and impossible to forget without realising that it’s like nothing else you’ll ever read, because it’s the best thing you’ve ever read — Ore Agbaje-Williams The Recovery House starts as an arresting, nuanced portrait of an artist in crisis, and ends as a finely wrought exploration of how we create meaning in the darkest periods of our lives. I loved it — Krystelle Bamford In THE RECOVERY HOUSE, Derek Owusu writes movingly about attention as a form of devotion, about bearing witness as a mode of care. I loved this beautiful book that explores the ways reading and writing make and unmake us — Sarah Bernstein