Giada Scodellaro is one of the most astonishing writers of her generation and Ruins, Child is a visionary novel. Scodellaro refracts and redefines the canon of Black culture, the archive of Black experience. The result is a masterpiece that lives and breathes on the page, every sentence shimmering with wit, musicality, brilliance and verve.

Her prose makes the borders of genre feel irrelevant… What matters is Scodellaro’s exhilarating freedom of mind.

Giada Scodellaro's newest masterpiece, Ruins, Child, endows the concept and form of the contemporary novel with new force and meaning. Cinematic and prismatic, like a camera constantly in motion and yet incisive in its close portraitures of a community of Black women and fems surviving and living amidst the future urban, eco-dystopic, queer ruins of our society, Scodellaro’s novel breaks new ground in spectacular fashion.

Ruins, Child takes us to the crumbling architecture of a future past; a future past that is possibly now. In this work of fractal seeing, we encounter women in lives that are simultaneously lived, reenacted, and observed. Ruins, Child is conceptually rich, prismatic, and choral, embodied, and surreal, cinematic and textual. Giada Scodellaro writes us Black life watching Black life.

Experimental and existential, this slim novel has been compared to Virginia Woolf's The Waves, yet it also defies categorization.

Mesmerizing and challenging... An arresting work by a writer unbound by constraints of the expected.

Her new book both dissolves formal definitions and grants them new permissions: the novel here becomes film, poem and score. Writing in our ruinous present, Scodellaro encloses her text in the archive, with extensive endnotes citing the Black canon from which her material constellated.