Set in what may be the future, and centered on six women sharing a space in a crumbling apartment tower, Ruins, Child is irreducibly original. Remarkable for its irresistible sweep, wit, and prickly splintered truth, Giada Scodellaro’s novel is like a precious old mirror: dropped, looking up, flashing light and bits of the undeniable. With the pulsating sway of its liquid mosaic narrative, the novel recalls Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, but is entirely its own animal: kaleidoscopic, pointedly disorienting in its looseness, and powered along by snatches of speech from its compelling ensemble cast (often vernacular, often overheard: “The woman is old, I hear children saying, not in the way we consider all adults to be old, but really old, ancient, she is endless”). It’s a book seemingly drawn from deep wells of Black American reality: Scodellaro’s female protagonists push back against authority in the very vivacity of their telling, setting afoot a freeing-up and a mysterious inversion of marginalization. “Looseness, that is the thing people fear in a person (in women) and in objects.” A surreal musing, Ruins, Child uses the lens of urban infrastructure, social commentary, folklore, choreography and collective listening to create an ethnography of place and an ode to communal ruins.
Forthcoming from New Directions (US), Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK), and Giramondo (AU) in early 2026.