Crudo

Delivered with an extraordinary, visceral immediacy, Crudo spins a new kind of fiction that speaks directly to our times. Acerbic, witty and daring it’s a novel that asks how - in the face of the overwhelming events of the present-day - we learn to live now.

Kathy assessed her life choices. Not bad. She was forty, she had a small diamond on her right hand, she was looking at a mountain, no one was currently in her way… she was doing her best.

Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It's the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart.

From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a Brexit-paralysed UK, Kathy spends the first summer of her 40s trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment just as Trump is tweeting the world into nuclear war.

But it's not only Kathy who's 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 one rogue tweet could end it all.

Known for her incisive, insightful non-fiction Olivia Laing’s first foray into fiction radically rewires the novel in a brilliant, funny and emphatically raw account of love in the apocalypse. A Goodbye to Berlin for the 21st century, Crudo charts in real time what it was like to live and love in the horrifying summer of 2017, from the perspective of a commitment-phobic peripatetic artist who may or may not be the experimental artist, punk poet and novelist Kathy Acker…