Ruins, Child
Winner of the 2024 Novel Prize, Giada Scodellaro’s Ruins, Child is an irreducibly original debut hybrid novel—a startlingly beautiful and unclassifiable book

Set in what may be the future, and centered on six women sharing a space in some sort of crumbling apartment tower, Ruins, Child is remarkable for its irresistible sweep, wit, and prickly splintered truth.  Like a precious old mirror that’s been dropped, it’s a book that is looking up at you, flashing light and bits of the undeniable. With the pulsating sway of its liquid mosaic narrative, the novel may recall Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, but is entirely its own animal: kaleidoscopic, 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 nearby, not in the way we consider all adults to be old, but really old, ancient, she is endless.” It’s a book seemingly drawn from deep wells of Black American reality: her female protagonists push back against authority in the very vivacity of their telling, setting afoot a freeing-up and a mysterious inversion of marginalization. “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, botany, social commentary, folklore, choreography, and collective listening to create an ethnography of place and an ode to communal ruins.
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Ruins, Child
Winner of the 2024 Novel Prize, Giada Scodellaro’s Ruins, Child is an irreducibly original debut hybrid novel—a startlingly beautiful and unclassifiable book

Set in what may be the future, and centered on six women sharing a space in some sort of crumbling apartment tower, Ruins, Child is remarkable for its irresistible sweep, wit, and prickly splintered truth.  Like a precious old mirror that’s been dropped, it’s a book that is looking up at you, flashing light and bits of the undeniable. With the pulsating sway of its liquid mosaic narrative, the novel may recall Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, but is entirely its own animal: kaleidoscopic, 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 nearby, not in the way we consider all adults to be old, but really old, ancient, she is endless.” It’s a book seemingly drawn from deep wells of Black American reality: her female protagonists push back against authority in the very vivacity of their telling, setting afoot a freeing-up and a mysterious inversion of marginalization. “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, botany, social commentary, folklore, choreography, and collective listening to create an ethnography of place and an ode to communal ruins.
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Ruins, Child

Ruins, Child

by Giada Scodellaro
Ruins, Child

Ruins, Child

by Giada Scodellaro

Overview

Winner of the 2024 Novel Prize, Giada Scodellaro’s Ruins, Child is an irreducibly original debut hybrid novel—a startlingly beautiful and unclassifiable book

Set in what may be the future, and centered on six women sharing a space in some sort of crumbling apartment tower, Ruins, Child is remarkable for its irresistible sweep, wit, and prickly splintered truth.  Like a precious old mirror that’s been dropped, it’s a book that is looking up at you, flashing light and bits of the undeniable. With the pulsating sway of its liquid mosaic narrative, the novel may recall Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, but is entirely its own animal: kaleidoscopic, 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 nearby, not in the way we consider all adults to be old, but really old, ancient, she is endless.” It’s a book seemingly drawn from deep wells of Black American reality: her female protagonists push back against authority in the very vivacity of their telling, setting afoot a freeing-up and a mysterious inversion of marginalization. “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, botany, social commentary, folklore, choreography, and collective listening to create an ethnography of place and an ode to communal ruins.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780811240215
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date: 03/24/2026
Pages: 128
Product dimensions: 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Giada Scodellaro was born in Naples, Italy and raised in the Bronx, New York. The recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, she is a queer writer and artist whose writings have appeared in The New Yorker, BOMB, and Harper’s. Her debut collection from Dorothy Project, Some of Them Will Carry Me, was one of The New Yorker’s best books of 2022.
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Fiction
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Fiction
Peoples & Cultures - Fiction
African Americans - Fiction & Literature
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