Ruins, Child

by Giada Scodellero

Winner of the 2024 Novel Prize, Ruins, Child is an experimental debut novel centered on six women living in a derelict apartment tower in a future urban landscape. The narrative is a liquid mosaic, utilizing snatches of speech, vernacular, and overlapping viewpoints to explore themes of communal survival, resistance, and the archive of Black experience. Drawing on lenses of urban infrastructure, botany, folklore, and choreography, the book functions as an ethnography of place, resisting traditional novelistic structures to create a kaleidoscopic, surrealist, and lyrical meditation on collective memory and the beauty of ruins.