Crudo

'I couldn't put it down' - Sally Rooney 'Crudo is a hot, hot book' - The Observer 'So fresh and clever and funny' - Tessa Hadley 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. 'Will blow you away' - Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize

Olivia Laing is an internationally acclaimed writer and critic. They're the author of eight books, including The Lonely City, Everybody and the Sunday Times number one bestseller The Garden Against Time. Crudo, their first novel, won the James Tait Black Prize and in 2018 they were awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize in nonfiction. Their work has been translated into twenty-one languages. Their latest novel is The Silver Book.