PositiveThe Skinny (UK)Eden has long coloured our image of heaven on Earth, but reading Laing’s book is more akin to the labour-intensive realities of yardwork: pockets of refuge and nurture break up necessary toil. The history of gardening, of humans occupying and reshaping land to their own design, is expectedly thorny.
Kaveh Akbar
RaveThe Skinny (UK)The book’s bricolage structure allows for jumps across borders, across time, that put its central character’s self-destructive habits in a compassionate frame. That a novel steeped with grief is so shockingly funny is testament to its radical authenticity
