Gabriel Smith

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Brat

Gabriel is an aspiring writer struggling to come to terms with the death of his father and the terminal illness of his mother. Suffering from a rare condition that makes his skin to peel off like a reptile, he can't seem to stop offending relatives and family friends, often at considerable physical cost to himself. Escaping the spectre of the girlfriend who has left him and the literary agent chasing him for the novel he has not even started, he returns to his family home to prepare it to be sold. Alone in the house, his skin shedding in ever-increasing frequency and quantity, with nothing but benzos, booze and memories for company, things take an uncanny turn: a manuscript for a novel written by his mother keeps changing, an old home video is similarly unstable and may reveal unsettling secrets, the house is becoming encased in Russian vines and a man dressed as a deer keeps appearing in the back garden. While handling age-old themes of mortality, familial love and the impermanence of art, Brat is not quite like anything you've ever read before. At once a dark and disquieting ghost story, a unique and brilliant meditation on grief, and a profoundly funny Bildungsroman in which the protagonist's education is anything but sentimental, it is a work of electrifying originality and bravura virtuosity by a major new literary talent.