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Crudo

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Crudo

By: Olivia Laing
Narrated by: Olivia Laing
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About this listen

Read by the author, Olivia Laing.

'I couldn't put it down' – Sally Rooney, author of Normal People

Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It’s the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart.

Kathy spends the first summer of her forties trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment – marriage. But it’s not only Kathy who is 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 it could all end at any moment?

From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a politically-paralysed UK, Olivia Laing's first novel is a love letter, inspired by the life and work of Kathy Acker. It is a blistering rewire of the form and a brilliant, funny and emphatically raw account of love in the apocalypse.

'[Crudo] will blow you away' – Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk

Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the Goldsmith's Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize

 Biographical Fiction Contemporary Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Political

Critic Reviews

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)
Laing’s prose shimmers and is selfish then, suddenly, full of love. It’s a high-wire act. This is the novel as a love letter to Acker. She gives her a happier ending than the one she had. She asks us what a novel can do when unreality rules. She asks what it is like to be alive when the old order is dying . . . Crudo is a hot, hot book. The fuse is lit. (Susanne Moore)
The status beach read of the summer
Finally, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the day I spent reading Olivia Laing’s Crudo. I couldn’t put it down, and then it overwhelmed me so much I had to put it down, and then I had to pick it back up again. A beautiful, strange, intelligent novel. (Sally Rooney, author of Conversations With Friends)
In Crudo her triumph, rather, is rendering on the page the texture of a very contemporary sensibility . . . The novel form famously struggles to represent the intersection in our lives of the personal-parochial and the political-global: here’s a way to try. And the writing is often so fresh and clever and funny. (Tessa Hadley)
Beautiful and strange, Olivia Laing’s Crudo is an urgent, compelling, funny and moving tale for our times. (Paula Hawkins)
A piece of electrifying writing
Electric and unputdownable, its 'love in the apocalypse' vibe is deep and light at the same time.
Laing’s fiction debut is a fizzy and thrilling tale of a woman who may or may not be experimental novelist Kathy Acker, preparing for marriage in the summer of 2017. Beautifully written with a voice that grabs from the off.
Crudo is intensely personal and simultaneously global in its concerns. It forces us to consider the two together and bind our own immediate dramas to those of the wider world. It is an important novel that shouts to the vastness and the urgency of what it means to be alive, now.
I read it in one go, lost all sense of time, floating on the rhythm, stung by the beats, I bet Kathy Acker would have loved it, I did. (Viv Albertine)
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)
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)
All stars
Most relevant
The story of an anxious and self-absorbed woman obsessed with herself, her creative life and social world. Highly referential to pop nd political culture, absorbed with disaffection with life and culture. Amusing and accomplished but glad it didn’t run any longer.

Urbane, poetic, neurotic, very right-now

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