A rich and multilayered literary adventure, this thought-provoking novel from the author of Pew finds the widow of an iconoclastic and metamorphic artist undertake the task of writing her biography.
Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2024
When X - an iconoclastic artist, writer and polarizing shape-shifter - dies suddenly, her widow, wild with grief, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognised as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora's box of secrets, betrayals and destruction. All the while she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.
A masterfully constructed, counter-factual literary adventure, complete with original images assembled by X's widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X's peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from David Bowie and Tom Waits to Susan Sontag and Kathy Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X's defining artistic project, CM realises her wife's deceptions were far crueller than she imagined.
Pulsing with suspense and intellect, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art and love, and that introduces an unforgettable character who shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.
Publisher: Granta Books
ISBN: 9781783789276
Number of pages: 416
Weight: 627 g
Dimensions: 230 x 153 x 29 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
A dazzling novel... Unbearable loss reveals itself as the compelling, moving heart of this intricately layered novel - Sunday Times
Discerning facts from fiction is the pleasure of this Russian doll of a book: a biography of an imaginary subject, written by an imaginary biographer, housed inside a novel pretending not to be one... Biography of X is almost certainly one of the most interesting books you'll read this year - Financial Times
From the superb opening line to [Lacey's] skewering of the art world and its pretensions, her discernments on grief and loss, the book is endlessly quotable... Come for the glamorous premise, stay for the icy precision of the prose - Irish Times
Catherine Lacey's brilliant, astonishing new novel... Everything in Lacey's novel is turned upside down - Chris Kraus, Washington Post
Biography of X is the most ambitious book I've ever read from a writer of my own generation. Epic world-building revealed through intimate emotion and dangerously honed sentences; a story that mixes fact and fiction to create a new register of truth, a register that belongs entirely to Catherine Lacey. I'm awed - Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
I'm not sure I know another novel that manages to be so many books at once... A profound novel about love and what it can license, about the toll - and maybe the con - of genius. Only Catherine Lacey could have written it - Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness
A triumphant high-wire act: all the breadth of a 19th century classic with the propulsiveness of a psychological thriller. I stayed up too late, wishing to uncover X's secrets alongside the narrator - Sara Novic, author of Girl at War
Sly, brilliant, philosophically acute, bitingly funny... a pure joy... It feels fairly rare for a novel to be hugely intelligent and moving and fun in equal measure, but with Biography of X, Catherine Lacey somehow - magically - makes the nearly impossible look easy. - Lauren Groff
Biography of X is a work of wonder, written with brilliant attention to detail... No single book can ever truly express who a person is or was. Catherine Lacey's ambitious novel promises no such thing - and is all the more fun for it - New Statesman
By turns laugh-out-loud funny and painfully sad... I couldn't help finding it all heartbreakingly real - Telegraph
[A] haunting, genre-bending novel... It's like looking at a family photograph in which something truly extraordinary - an avalanche or alien invasion - is taking place in the background - Guardian
Breathtaking in its scope and rigor, this unforgettable novel pushes contemporary fiction to dizzying heights. A triumph - Kirkus
[A] blockbuster novel... truly outstanding - Wall Street Journal
Utterly compelling... Exploring themes including freedom, truth, identity and myth-making on personal, political and national levels - Daily Mail
Consistently playful and inventive... We get the sense of a writer hitting a rich seam and mining it for all it's worth - TLS
Intricate, masterfully crafted and sprawling - The List
Mesmerising, provocative, deeply impressive - Spectator
Prismatic and brilliant - Vanity Fair
The most inventive and playful novel of the year... Lacey...is at her creative apex with Biography of X - Big Issue
An audacious novel of art and ideas set in an alternate late 20th century... This is brilliant - Publishers Weekly
Remarkable - Scotsman
Strange and dystopian and vividly imagined... Beneath the counterfactuals, and the glamour and squalor of Manhattan nightlife, and the mythologies bought and sold, she's telling a love story - New York Times
A tour-de-force - Library Journal
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“My favourite read this year.”
I knew about ten pages in that I was going to love this book. I wasn’t mistaken. It’s truly breathtaking what Catherine Lacey has achieved here in this strange hybrid of metafiction, reportage, biography,... More
“An inventive work of fiction”
Biography of X is a fictional memoir detailing the life of the eccentric and elusive artist X, as told by her widow. As the widow interviews many of the people that crossed paths with X during her life of constant... More
“Ridden with the eccentricities of lovers, echoing in a politically dystopian uncertainty and the very real instabilities of artistry, 'Biography of X' playfully blurs truth on every level.”
When an artist creates a buzz among their contemporaries, it may perhaps be sudden to assume they will go on to total prolificacy. Though they spark talent, their oeuvres show technical deft and are contemporarily... More
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