Brat - Gabriel Smith

'Full of dark, deadpan humour, Brat is a raucous story of the messy, messed-up business of living, dying and having a family.' Financial Times


'A moving coming-of-age family story' Observer




'Iconic', Radio 1

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,Bratis 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.

'This original, clever story is brilliant on grief, madness and creativity. It's beautifully written, hilarious and heart-breaking. I raced through it.' Daily Mail

'Gabriel Smith has written a truly unique and surprising book. He is the rarest thing: a distinctive stylist on the line and structure level.Bratis so strange and so funny. I laughed a lot while reading.'Rachel Connolly, author ofLazy City

'Messy with glitched realities and body horror,Bratbreathes the same thrillingly claustrophobic air asInland EmpireandUbik. 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 ofSame Bed Different Dreams

'Gabriel Smith's prose is like if Joan Didion and Shirley Jackson took Xanax and used the internet.Bratis a sharp, eerie, confident debut about grief, memory, art, and so much more. Smith is a major new talent.'Jordan Castro, author ofThe 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 aPortrait of the Artist as a Young Manfor a new, quaking generation.Bratwill unnerve and seduce you.'Garielle Lutz, author of Worsted