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A New York Times Notable, The New Yorker, Washington Post, NPR, Guardian, Esquire, and Bustle Best Book of 2018
"Love may not be original, but this funny, fervent novel is." - The New Yorker
It's the summer of 2017 and Kathy is getting married. Meanwhile, fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is heating up, and Trump is tweeting the world ever closer to nuclear war. 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 in sight.
First published in hardcover and e-book Sept 2018. Paperback reprint: Sept 2019.
"Like the foodstuff for which it is named, Olivia Laing's Crudo is weird, intense, served in a small portion, and totally delicious... Beautifully written and artfully focused."—Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker
"A single moment in modernity, deconstructed by the savagely entertaining, Acker-inspired voice of Laing."—Paris Review Daily
"A narrative written with immense vitality and, miraculously, the lightest of touches."—Deborah Levy, Wall Street Journal
"Written with bristling intelligence, this debut novel… pays homage to the iconoclastic author Kathy Acker, creating a pastiche of voices and identities."—New York Times, "Notable Book of 2018"
"Breathless and gripping.… [Crudo] traps the first summer of Trump and Brexit like a fly in amber.… As a record, Crudo is perfect, and agonizing."—NPR
"[Crudo is] about the longing to escape our ossified selves—to become, if only for moment or within the pages of a novel, someone wilder and more radically free. And in staging that longing so directly and so honestly, Olivia Laing makes Crudo her own."—New York Times Book Review
"Crudo could turn out to be a novel that we pick up years from now to remind ourselves how these times felt."—Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker
"Crudo seduces from the very first sentence. Laing as Acker is not a literary device—it is literary detonation.… Crudo is a hot, hot book."—Guardian
This information about Crudo was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Jonathan Ring
Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She's the author of seven books, including To the River (2011), The Trip to Echo Spring (2013), The Lonely City (2016) and Everybody (2021). She's a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2018 was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty-one languages.
Her first novel, Crudo, is a real-time account of the turbulent summer of 2017. It was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Laing writes on art and culture for the Guardian, Financial Times and New York Times, among many other publications. She's written catalogue essays on a variety of contemporary artists, including Andy Warhol, Agnes Martin, Derek Jarman, Wolfgang Tillmans ...
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