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