You'll Like it Here

You'll Like it Here is a haunting bricolage, divided into three parts, that excavates the forgotten history of Redondo Beach in the early 1900s through old news clippings, advertisements, recipes, and other ephemera. These elements speak to the ills of male stoicism, industrialisation and capitalism, and environmental displacement. Ashton utilised digital archives from the Redondo Reflex and other city-adjacent newspapers as the basis for his surrealist account. He masterfully traces a larger shift away from coastal maritime repose in the wake of the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, and World War II, through momentary fragments that feel as real and palpable as they do transient, mythological, and strangely reminiscent of current times.

Formally, You'll Like it Here works in conversation with Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Maggie Nelson's Bluets, Amina Cain's Indelicacy, and Kathryn Scanlan's Aug 9 Fog. The novel also embraces a multi-register, journalistic storytelling that questions the tenuous line between objectivity and subjectivity in documenting the unreliability of history—both personal and collective. It brilliantly balances voids of loss, absence, and disappearance with moments of natural transcendence and miraculous phenomena.