Ruins, Child

Giada Scodellaro

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Book cover for Ruins, Child
Image for variant 9780811240215
Book cover for Ruins, Child
Image for variant 9780811240215

Ruins, Child

Ruins, Child

Giada Scodellaro

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Description

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."

Critical Reviews

Her prose makes the borders of genre feel irrelevant... What matters is Scodellaro's exhilarating freedom of mind.--Julia Conrad "The Millions"

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.--John Keene

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.--Dionne Brand

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.
--Katie Kitamura

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

Mesmerizing and challenging... An arresting work by a writer unbound by constraints of the expected.-- "Publishers Weekly"

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.-- "Frieze"

A gorgeous work of collective witness set against an urban landscape . . . Ruins, Child is a surrealist, cinematic telling with an eye towards the future.--Annie Liontas "Electric Literature"

Publishing Information

Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Pub date: 2026-04-07
Length: 128 pages

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