Crudo: A Novel - Hardcover

Olivia Laing is the author of three much-admired works of biography, memoir, and criticism. Her most recent, The Lonely City, was translated into fifteen languages. In 2018 she was awarded the Windham-Campbell prize for non-fiction. She lives in London, England, and Crudo is her first novel.

“Crudo could turn out to be a novel that we pick up years from now to remind ourselves how these times felt... Love may not be original, but this funny, fervent novel is.”
- Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker

“Written with bristling intelligence... [Crudo is] about the longing to escape our ossified selves―to become, if only for  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

“Like the foodstuff for which it is named, Olivia Laing's Crudo is weird, intense, served in a small portion, and totally delicious... Beautifully written and artfully focused.”
- Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker

“Breathless and gripping... [Crudo] traps the first summer of Trump and Brexit like a fly in amber.”
- NPR

“[A] pretzel twist of form and meaning... Laing strikes some terrific chords in this novel.”
- Dwight Garner, New York Times

“Crudo seduces from the very first sentence. Laing as Acker is not a literary device―it is literary detonation... Crudo is a hot, hot book.”
- Guardian

“[A] single moment in modernity, deconstructed by the savagely entertaining, Acker-inspired voice of Laing.”
- Paris Review Daily

“A narrative written with immense vitality and, miraculously, the lightest of touches... It's a subversive love story that shouldn't work, but does.”
- Deborah Levy, Wall Street Journal

“Laing's experiment, and it's a good one, is to describe the world―her world, between May 17 and September 23, 2017―as precisely as she can... [Crudo is] a short, entirely readable, and lovably eccentric book.”
- Nick Hornby, The Believer

“Laing...dunks you into the narrative and its fast-moving waters. It's only once you get to the end that you realize you've been holding your breath.”
- Vanity Fair