Synopses & Reviews
A New York Times Notable, The New Yorker, Washington Post, NPR, Guardian, Esquire, and Bustle Best Book of 2018
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.
Review
“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
Review
“A single moment in modernity, deconstructed by the savagely entertaining, Acker-inspired voice of Laing.”
Paris Review Daily
Review
“Love may not be original, but this funny, fervent novel is." The New Yorker
Review
“[Crudo is] about the longing to escape our ossified selves ― to become, if only for a 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
About the Author
Winner of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction, Olivia Laing is the author of three previous books of nonfiction, including The Lonely City, and one novel, Crudo. Her work has been translated into fifteen languages. She lives in London, England.