Paperback:  Crudo (2018) is a brilliant, funny, and emphatically raw novel of love on the brink of the apocalypse, from the acclaimed author of The Lonely City.

"She had no idea what to do with love, she experienced it as invasion, as the prelude to loss and pain, she really didn’t have a clue."

Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married.  It is the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart.  Fast-paced and frantic, Crudo unfolds in real time from the full-throttle perspective of a commitment-phobic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker.

From a Tuscan hotel for the superrich to a Brexit-paralyzed United Kingdom, Kathy spends the first summer of her forties adjusting to the idea of a lifelong commitment.  But it is not only Kathy who is changing.  Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is heating up, and Trump is tweeting the world ever-closer to nuclear war. 

How do you make art, let alone a life, when one rogue tweet could end it all?

In Crudo, her first work of fiction, Olivia Laing radically rewires the novel with a fierce, compassionate account of learning to love when the end of the world seems near.

About the author:  Olivia Laing is a writer, cultural critic and novelist.  Her first book, To the River (2011) is the story of a midsummer journey down the river Virginia Woolf drowned in.  It was a book of the year in the Evening Standard, Independent and Financial Times and was shortlisted for the 2012 Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year.

Her second, The Trip to Echo Spring (2013), explores the liquid links between writers and alcohol. Hilary Mantel described it as 'one of the best books I've read on the creative uses of adversity'.  It was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize, and was a book of the year in the New York Times, Time, Observer, Times, Economist and Statesman.

Her new book, The Lonely City (2016), is an investigation into loneliness by way of art, including Andy Warhol, Edward Hopper and David Wojnarowicz.  Peter Carey described it as "continually unexpected, stimulating and beautifully structured."

Laing has been the deputy books editor of the Observer, and writes for The Guardian, New York Times, Frieze and New Statesman among other publications.  She is a MacDowell and Yaddo Fellow, was 2014 Eccles Writer in Residence at the British Library.and has received grants from the Arts Council and the Authors’ Foundation.  In 2018, she was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for non-fiction and in 2019, Crudo won the 100th James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the UK's oldest literary award.  She lives in Cambridge, England.

Rating:  3/5