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Crudo

By Olivia Laing
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Brief Description
Shortlisted for the Goldsmith's Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize and the James Tait Black Award. Dive into a tale of love and loathing with the beach read of the summer. Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It's the summer of 2017 and the whole... Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
$2800
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The blisteringly funny and remarkably tender debut novel from Olivia Laing, one of the finest non-fiction writers of a generation.

A blisteringly funny and remarkably tender debut novel from Olivia Laing, one of the finest non-fiction writers of her generation.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

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

Dive into a tale of love and loathing with the beach read of the summer.

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 forties 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.

Olivia Laing 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 artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker...

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781037414961

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 04 June 2026

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Macmillan

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 11.0mm

Width: 130.0mm

Height: 202.0mm

Weight: 118g

Pages: 160

Collections

Contemporary Romance Fiction General Fiction LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction Olivia Laing Romance

About the Author

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She writes for the Guardian, New Statesman and Frieze among many other publications. Her first book, To the River, was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. The Trip to Echo Spring was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Gordon Burn Prize. The Lonely City was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and translated into fifteen languages. In 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize. She lives in London.

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