Crudo

Nominated for the Goldsmith's Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, and the James Tait Black Award.

Dive into a tale of love and aversion with the summer beach book.

Kathy is a writer. Kathy gets 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-battered United Kingdom, Kathy spends the first summer of her forties getting used to making a lifelong commitment while Trump tweets the world into a nuclear war. But it's not just Kathy who is changing. Political, social, and natural landscapes are all at risk. Fascism is on the rise, the truth is dead, and the planet is warming. Is it really worth learning to love when the end of the world is near? And how does one create art, let alone a life, when a single thoughtless tweet could end everything?

Olivia Laing radically rewires the novel in a brilliant, witty, and empathetically raw account of love in the apocalypse. A farewell to Berlin for the 21st century, Crudo documents in real-time what it was like to live and love during the terrifying summer of 2017, from the perspective of a commitment-phobic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker.