Crudo - Hardcover

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 15 languages. In 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize. She lives in London.

Crudo has all the beauty and music and clarity of Olivia Laing's non-fiction, but with something more too. Entrancing, charming, fascinating, I literally couldn't put it down. -- Jeremy Gavron Crudo has crept up on me. I have just finished it and I am filling up with tears and I am not sure why. It seemed to be speaking from deep within me and also at me, like a mirror that won't leave me alone, that insists I stare into it day after day, talking to me, to my gaze. What a special piece of work. And the rhythm is perfect. -- Lara Pawson Sharp, witty, compassionate and totally engaging. Crudo is a brilliant novel. -- Patrick McGrath It is an extraordinary novel of style and savagery: poised, transgressive and transformative. I read it hungrily. It left me licking my lips -- Jon Day Witty, hectic, effervescent, and deliciously derailing, Olivia Laing's first venture into fiction holds up a mirror to our troubled times -- Rupert Thomson Crudo feels like a perfect response to the nasty, lovely days that we're living in and the contemporary smorgasbord of identities . . . The presence of Kathy Acker was brilliantly handled - I believed so completely, for the duration of the novel, that she had lived through last summer. I love how Laing throws these lines to the past - it feels unique to her writing. And it's weirdly reassuring. -- Sara Baume Olivia Laing is a genius - not a word I throw about lightly. It is raw and breathless and effortlessly radical, and having turned the last page I couldn't even set it down before beginning it again. In a time of political auto-satire and the surreal unravelling of meaning itself, many novelists are left uncertain how they ought to respond. This - Crudo - is how. -- Francesca Segal I adored Crudo. I believe it is a great novel. Olivia writes so beautifully about life and nature in both city and country, and always finds some aspect to laugh about, one feels today's world is worth saving. I also adore Kathy, her whacky, sexy, promiscuous heroine. The story is so funny and touching, I can't wait to read it again. -- Jilly Cooper A dazzling, profound and darkly comic inquisition into what it is to be human. To read Crudo is to experience magic on every page. Olivia Laing's writing leaves me breathless with awe -- Elizabeth Day, author of The Party Chic, compassionate, crabby, perspicacious, and marvellously playful - Crudo is a huge-hearted novel that conveys the weight of the world with the lightest touch - I loved the mercurial energy that flew off its fast-turning pages. -- Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond We hereby acknowledge the irresistible rise of Olivia Laing, a writer incapable of anything other than full-on, nonstop brilliance. Crudo, her secular creed for crazy times, only proves her magical moment: to be there in it, and to take us along, too. One long electric dream, spinning with intimate energy and the sharpest saddest funniest humour, it's so utterly in-the-moment that you'll forget you aren't reading about yourself. -- Philip Hoare, author of RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR Reading Olivia Laing's short, sleek novel Crudo is like seeing the (very) recent past through a wall of mirrors. Laing adopts fragments of Kathy Acker's writings and life to arrive at a narrative style that's readable, shockingly new, and surprisingly tender. I didn't want it to stop. -- Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick Written at a war-mongering time of rising nationalisms, the vitality of Olivia Laing's questioning love letter to life and to art will blow you away -- Deborah Levy Chic, compassionate, crabby, perspicacious, and marvellously playful - Crudo is a huge-hearted novel that conveys the weight of the world with the lightest touch - I loved the mercurial energy that flew off its fast-turning pages. -- Viv Albertine