Gabriel Smith
autor
BRAT
THE INSTANT CULT CLASSIC FROM THE WINNER OF THE O. HENRY PRIZE‘Full of dark, deadpan humour, Brat is a raucous story of the messy, messed-up business of living, dying and having a family.’ Financial Times‘A moving coming-of-age family story’ Observer'Beautifully written, hilarious, and heartbreaking' Daily Mail'A raw, delicate tale about grief and growing up' The New Yorker 'Iconic', Radio 1'The novel crackles with gothic horror, deadpan humor, and a damning sense of alienation that you won’t soon shake.' Chicago Review of Books'Instead of resolving his novel’s many mysteries, Smith explores how this family navigates the disputed borders of its shared memories, pondering what it means to choose one story over another—as well as the consequences of refusing to choose, especially in the wake of grief.' The New York Times ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Gabriel’s skin is falling off. His dad is dead. He owes his editor a novel. His girlfriend won’t answer his calls. Tasked by his horribly well-adjusted brother with clearing out the family home for sale, Gabriel’s sanity quickly begins to unravel. His parents’ old manuscripts appear to change each time he reads them. A bizarre home video hints at long-buried secrets. And there’s 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. From a stunningly original new talent, this is a debut novel unlike anything you have read before.
BRAT - A Ghost Story
The brilliant and breathless debut novel that will appeal to fans of Ottessa Moshfegh, Max Porter and Julia May Jonas
Gabriel is an aspiring writer struggling to come to terms with the death of his father and the terminal illness of his mother. Suffering from a rare condition that makes his skin to peel off like a reptile, he can’t seem to stop offending relatives and family friends, often at considerable physical cost to himself.
Escaping the spectre of the girlfriend who has left him and the literary agent chasing him for the novel he has not even started, he returns to his family home to prepare it to be sold. Alone in the house, his skin shedding in ever-increasing frequency and quantity, with nothing but benzos, booze and memories for company, things take an uncanny turn: a manuscript for a novel written by his mother keeps changing, an old home video is similarly unstable and may reveal unsettling secrets, the house is becoming encased in Russian vines and a man dressed as a deer keeps appearing in the back garden.
While handling age-old themes of mortality, familial love and the impermanence of art, Brat is not quite like anything you’ve ever read before. At once a dark and disquieting ghost story, a unique and brilliant meditation on grief, and a profoundly funny Bildungsroman in which the protagonist’s education is anything but sentimental, it is a work of electrifying originality and bravura virtuosity by a major new literary talent.
