little scratch
Shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize 2021
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
**Shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize 2021**
**Shortlisted for The Desmond Elliott Prize 2021**
**An Observer 10 Best Debut Novelists of 2021**
'An extremely perceptive depiction of power and agency.' Guardian
'Startlingly original.' VOGUE
'Extraordinary.' New Yorker
little scratch tells the story of a day in the life of an unnamed woman, living in a lower-case world of demarcated fridge shelves and office politics; clock-watching and WhatsApp notifications. In a voice that is fiercely wry, touchingly delicate and increasingly neurotic, the protagonist relays what it takes to get through the quotidian detail of that single trajectory - from morning to night - while processing recent sexual violence.
little scratch is about the coexistence of monotony with our waking, intelligent lives. It is a powerful evocation of how the external and internal aspects of our lives exist in a helix, and what it means to live out the course of a single day consumed by trauma.
*Please note that due to eBook formats, this title is not compatible with the Paperwhite device.*
'Wry, funny and heartbreaking.' Sophie Mackintosh
'little scratch is a story that is urgent. It is a story that needs to be told.' Meena Kandasamy
'Reads like the cinders settling in the air after an explosion... daring and completely readable.' Colin Barrett
'little scratch is a little miracle... impossible to read it and not wish there were more books like it.' Alan Trotter
'Confident and vital... little scratch is an absolute gift.' Naoise Dolan
www.rebeccawatson.co.uk
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Watson experiments with line breaks, repetition, and columns to express the unnamed narrator's frenetic consciousness over a single day in this inventive, immersive debut. The narrator wakes with memories of an uncomfortable sexual encounter, after dreaming about it from an out-of-body perspective. Meanwhile, she registers a persistent itch that causes her to scratch herself raw ("blood under my nails from fucking scratching in my sleep"). As the novel progresses through the narrator's routine and commute to her unsatisfying job at a London news agency ("got to do this thing again, the waking up thing, the day thing, the work thing"), she struggles to resist scratching her arms and legs. Competing thoughts often run parallel in two columns, with intensity indicated in all caps and dialogue in italics. Watson's clever convention and set pieces are not simply flourishes but integral to the plot and themes. There's much relatable humor in the heroine's everyday snafus, such as her struggle for coherence while speaking with a male colleague, and a tedious task with a glue stick, the low point of her workday. The tone shifts as the narrator begins to consider that she was raped, and the last third of the novel becomes genuinely harrowing and unsettling. Watson's haunting, virtuosic performance is well worth a look.
