โGabriel Smith has written a truly unique and surprising book. He is the rarest thing: a distinctive stylist on the line and structure level.ย Bratย is so strange and so funny. I laughed a lot while reading.โย Rachel Connolly, author ofย Lazy City
'Iconic', Radio 1
'i've never heard of you. good luck with your book tho !' Charli XCX onย X,ย formerlyย Twitter
I was in the waiting room. Then I was in the examination
room.
ย
Gabrielโs skin is falling off.
ย
His dad is dead.
ย
He owes his editor a novel.
ย
His girlfriend wonโt answer his calls.
ย
Tasked by his horribly well-adjusted brother with clearing out the family home for sale, Gabrielโs sanity quickly begins to unravel. His parentsโ old manuscripts appear to change each time he reads them. A bizarre home video hints at long-buried secrets. And thereโs a hideous man in the garden.
Disquieting and hilarious, taut yet lyrical, blisteringly-paced but formally inventive,ย Bratย is a mediation on grief, art and love that will leave you altered, breathless and desperate for more.ย
ย
From a stunningly original new talent, this is a debut novel unlike anything you have read before.ย
โMessy with glitched realities and body horror,ย Bratย breathes the same thrillingly claustrophobic air asย Inland Empireย andย Ubik. Itโs a skin-shedding ouroboros of grief and laughter, and the most brain-melting British debut Iโve read in ages.โ Ed Park, author ofย Same Bed Different Dreams
ย
โGabriel Smithโs prose is like if Joan Didion and Shirley Jackson took Xanax and used the internet.ย Bratย is a sharp, eerie, confident debut about grief, memory, art, and so much more. Smith is a major new talent.โ Jordan Castro, author ofย The Novelist
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โGabriel Smithโs jauntily creepy and hilarious tale of a grief-stalked scapegraceโs sloughing-off and regeneration of selves in the filial murk of a moldering homestead is aย Portrait of the Artist as a Young Manย for a new, quaking generation.ย Bratย will unnerve and seduce you.โ Garielle Lutz, author of Worsted
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