Giada Scodellaro | Ruins, Child - Signed Copy

Set in what may be the future, and centred on six women sharing a space in some sort of crumbling apartment tower, Ruins, Child is remarkable for its irresistible sweep, wit, and prickly splintered truth. Giada Scodellaro’s novel is like a precious old mirror: dropped, looking up at you, flashing light and bits of the undeniable. With the pulsating sway of its liquid mosaic narrative, the novel may recall Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, but is entirely its own animal: kaleidoscopic, pointedly disorienting in its looseness, and powered along by snatches of speech from its compelling ensemble cast, often vernacular, often overheard. It’s a book seemingly drawn from deep wells of Black American reality: Scodellaro’s female protagonists push back against authority in the very vivacity of their telling, setting afoot a freeing-up and a mysterious inversion of marginalization. A surreal musing, Ruins, Child uses the lens of urban infrastructure, social commentary, folklore, choreography and collective listening to create an ethnography of place and an ode to communal ruins.

‘Mesmerizing… The novel has little by way of plot, but much to offer in terms of beauty. For readers willing to surrender to the sway and creep of Scodallero’s prose, it can feel much like watching an art house film, where, as one of the novel’s characters puts it, “we are lost in the potential of this scene”. The result is an arresting work by a writer unbound by constraints of the expected.’
—  Publishers Weekly