Giada Scodellaro, RUINS, CHILD

Giada Scodellaro, assistant professor at Columbia University and author of Some of Them Will Carry Me, visits the store for her debut novel, Ruins, Child, winner of the 2024 Novel Prize. Winner of the 2024 Novel Prize, Giada Scodellaro’s Ruins, Child is an irreducibly original debut hybrid novel—a startlingly beautiful and unclassifiable book. Remarkable for its irresistible sweep, wit, and prickly splintered truth, Ruins, Child is a kaleidoscopic work, pointedly disorienting in its looseness, and powered along by snatches of speech from its compelling ensemble cast, often vernacular, often overheard: “The woman is old, I hear children saying, not in the way we consider all adults to be old, but really old, ancient, she is endless.” Seemingly drawn from deep wells of Black American reality, Scodellaro’s female protagonists push against authority in the very vivacity of their telling. “Looseness, that is the thing people fear in a person (in women) and in objects.” A surreal musing, Ruins, Child uses the lens of urban infrastructure, social commentary, folklore, choreography and collective listening to create an ethnography of place and an ode to communal ruins. Giada Scodellaro is the author of the collection Some of Them Will Carry Me (Dorothy, a publishing project), named one of The New Yorker’s best books of 2022. Her writings have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New Yorker, BOMB, Harper’s, Granta, and Brick, among others. She is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University. Winner of The Novel Prize, her debut novel, Ruins, Child, is out now from New Directions (US), Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK), and Giramondo (AU).