Publisher's Synopsis
"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 Twitter
I 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
