BRAT : A Ghost Story

"Gabriel Smith has written a truly unique and surprising book. He is the rarest thing: a distinctive stylist on the line and structure level.�Brat�is so strange and so funny. I laughed a lot while reading."�Rachel Connolly, author of�Lazy City 'Iconic', Radio 1 'i've never heard of you. good luck with your book tho !' Charli XCX on�X,�formerly�TwitterI was in the waiting room. Then I was in the examination room. � 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.� "Messy with glitched realities and body horror,�Brat�breathes the same thrillingly claustrophobic air as�Inland Empire�and�Ubik. It's a skin-shedding ouroboros of grief and laughter, and the most brain-melting British debut I've read in ages." Ed Park, author of�Same Bed Different Dreams � "Gabriel Smith's prose is like if Joan Didion and Shirley Jackson took Xanax and used the internet.�Brat�is a sharp, eerie, confident debut about grief, memory, art, and so much more. Smith is a major new talent." Jordan Castro, author of�The Novelist � "Gabriel Smith's jauntily creepy and hilarious tale of a grief-stalked scapegrace's sloughing-off and regeneration of selves in the filial murk of a moldering homestead is a�Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man�for a new, quaking generation.�Brat�will unnerve and seduce you." Garielle Lutz, author of Worsted "Smith's picaresque first novel is told from the perspective of Gabriel, a writer struggling with numerous issues . . . a deeply gothic work that never quite settles the reader in a certain world as Gabriel's foibles, ghostly visions, and uncertainties filter every moment. Written in short, clipped chapters and featuring uproarious dialogue (especially with Gabriel's brother), this is a darkly comic and brilliantly unusual debut." Booklist "[Smith's] dialogue shines . . . Readers who appreciate the morbidly funny and the just plain morbid will find a lot to love in these pages. A weird and darkly funny novel from a writer to watch."�Kirkus �