Ruins, Child

Winner of the 2024 Novel Prize, Giada Scodellaro’s Ruins, Child is an irreducibly original debut hybrid novel—a startlingly beautiful and unclassifiable book

Centered on six women sharing a space in a derelict apartment tower and set in what maybe the future, Ruins, Child is remarkable for its sweep, wit, and the sway of its liquid mosaic narrative, powered along by snatches of speech. “The woman is old, I hear children saying nearby, not in the way we consider all adults to be old, but really old, ancient, she is endless.” Using the lenses of urban infrastructure, botany, folklore, choreography, and collective listening, Ruins, Child creates a new ethnography of place and an ode both to communal ruins and to resistance. In the vivacity of their telling, Scodellaro’s heroines obscure authority, setting afoot a radical freeing-up. “Looseness, that is the thing people fear in a person (in women) and in objects.”