Crudo

The reputation that Olivia Laing gathered from her books on writers and nature (To the River), writers and drinking (The Trip to Echo Spring), and writers and loneliness (The Lonely City) caused quite a bit of anticipation for this, her first novel. It's a slim one, and immersed in the moment, in the summer of 2017 in particular, a time, as she writes, of increasing cruelty, and of people warming to it. She's writing in the style of the new "autofiction"—some parts of the story seem taken from her life—but with a twist: rather than a mere "I" her main character is "Kathy," filled with the spirit of the late writer Kathy Acker. That turn brings a nicely unsettling shift in identity, and also a melancholy sort of hope, as we watch Kathy (the real Acker died in 1997) surviving into this terrible time, and also into a late discovery of love.