Crudo could turn out to be a novel that we pick up years from now to remind ourselves how these times felt. Love may not be original, but this funny, fervent novel is. --Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker Written with bristling intelligence. [ Crudo is] about the longing to escape our ossified selves--to become, if only for moment or within the pages of a novel, someone wilder and more radically free. And in staging that longing so directly and so honestly, Olivia Laing makes Crudo her own. --New York Times Book Review Like the foodstuff for which it is named, Olivia Laing's Crudo is weird, intense, served in a small portion, and totally delicious. Beautifully written and artfully focused. --Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, "More Books We Loved in 2018" Breathless and gripping.

[ Crudo ] traps the first summer of Trump and Brexit like a fly in amber. --NPR [A] pretzel twist of form and meaning. Laing strikes some terrific chords in this novel.--Dwight Garner, New York Times Crudo seduces from the very first sentence. Laing as Acker is not a literary device--it is literary detonation. Crudo is a hot, hot book. --Guardian [A] single moment in modernity, deconstructed by the savagely entertaining, Acker-inspired voice of Laing.--Paris Review Daily A narrative written with immense vitality and, miraculously, the lightest of touches.

It's a subversive love story that shouldn't work, but does.--Deborah Levy, Wall Street Journal Laing's experiment, and it's a good one, is to describe the world--her world, between May 17 and September 23, 2017--as precisely as she can. [ Crudo is] a short, entirely readable, and lovably eccentric book. --Nick Hornby, The Believer Laing.dunks you into the narrative and its fast-moving waters. It's only once you get to the end that you realize you've been holding your breath.--Vanity Fair [ Crudo ] manages to capture the delirium and anxiety of carrying on through [this] turbulent period with searing clarity. --Time.