SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE 2024
SKY ARTS AWARD NOMINEE for BREAKTHROUGH ARTIST OF THE YEAR 2024
‘ALL THE HOT WOMEN I KNOW HAVE ELLA FREARS ON THEIR BEDSIDE TABLES’ Sheena Patel
‘It’s Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground reimaged for the renting generation’ Emily Dinsdale, DAZED
‘A dazzling treat of a book, genuinely inventive, spiky and funny’ Holly Williams, Observer
‘As compelling as any thriller’ Graeme Richardson, Sunday Times
‘I urge you to read Ella Frears’ wild and dark new book’ Eva Wiseman, The Observer
‘A dark, addictive and deceptively erudite read’ Kate Simpson, Telegraph (5*)
I had to wait, input a five-digit code sent to me via text.
When it came through it was:
00000 which seems insane.
I stared at it for more than my allotted minutes.
How is it that I found myself with all those holes?
A row of ohs. Disgusting.
No, I can’t go on.
I won’t, Ava. Do you watch porn?
Asked by letting agent, Ava, to make an account with the ominous sounding property technology ‘Goodlord’, our narrator launches into a breathless and rage fuelled reply that swings wildly between anecdotes of chaotic house-shares, grubby university halls, the claustrophobic school days that haunt her still, her various underpaid exploitative jobs at pubs and restaurants, relationships and sexual encounters both troubling and ecstatic, and an artists’ residency that offers her the space she craves but demands a complicated transaction in return.
Written in sharp, unflinching prose, Goodlord exposes the grinding inequalities of modern life. It is a blistering exploration of what it means to live in a world where everything, including your dignity, comes with a price tag.
SKY ARTS AWARD NOMINEE for BREAKTHROUGH ARTIST OF THE YEAR 2024
‘ALL THE HOT WOMEN I KNOW HAVE ELLA FREARS ON THEIR BEDSIDE TABLES’ Sheena Patel
‘It’s Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground reimaged for the renting generation’ Emily Dinsdale, DAZED
‘A dazzling treat of a book, genuinely inventive, spiky and funny’ Holly Williams, Observer
‘As compelling as any thriller’ Graeme Richardson, Sunday Times
‘I urge you to read Ella Frears’ wild and dark new book’ Eva Wiseman, The Observer
‘A dark, addictive and deceptively erudite read’ Kate Simpson, Telegraph (5*)
I had to wait, input a five-digit code sent to me via text.
When it came through it was:
00000 which seems insane.
I stared at it for more than my allotted minutes.
How is it that I found myself with all those holes?
A row of ohs. Disgusting.
No, I can’t go on.
I won’t, Ava. Do you watch porn?
Asked by letting agent, Ava, to make an account with the ominous sounding property technology ‘Goodlord’, our narrator launches into a breathless and rage fuelled reply that swings wildly between anecdotes of chaotic house-shares, grubby university halls, the claustrophobic school days that haunt her still, her various underpaid exploitative jobs at pubs and restaurants, relationships and sexual encounters both troubling and ecstatic, and an artists’ residency that offers her the space she craves but demands a complicated transaction in return.
Written in sharp, unflinching prose, Goodlord exposes the grinding inequalities of modern life. It is a blistering exploration of what it means to live in a world where everything, including your dignity, comes with a price tag.
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Reviews
I urge you to read [this] wild and dark new book
Goodlord is a moreish contemporary epic as email . . . Goodlord offers something like the antithesis to a celebrity home tour. In Frears's poetic architecture of contemporary metropolitan living, precarity of circumstance is linked to precarity of mind
Frears splices humour with thought-provoking imagery and Fleabag-style talk-to-camera- moments that will make you feel seen
A witty, indignant and poignant look at the way our desire for a place to call home has been misshapen and distorted by the morbid pathologies of the market
A dazzling treat of a book, genuinely inventive, spiky and funny . . . Goodlord zips along, blackly compelling and readable . . . Frears's writing is like lightning - fast, crackling and illuminating, even in well-worn territory. Goodlord offers a flash of insight into the darkest corners of generation rent
ALL THE HOT WOMEN I KNOW HAVE ELLA FREARS ON THEIR BEDSIDE TABLES
This poet is a bit special. She's exciting, a bit scary and sort of brilliant
Fizzing with insistent energy... full of crystalline images and metaphors.... Frears is excellent on sexual politics, the end of girlhood
'Above all, Goodlord is brilliantly original and fabulously entertaining'
Goodlord takes the form of a long, rambling email to an estate agent . . . this apparently artless tale of the young narrator's various dwellings - mouldy flats, chaotic flat-shares, dingy basements - becomes as compelling as any thriller . . . Frears retains her poet's eye for the memorable phrase . . . But she also deploys a rarer gift, tackling grand themes - property, misogyny, justice - without preaching or ranting. Anger about the precarity and indignity of modern life burns through these pages. But you don't want to look away.
A trailblazing, genre-defying coup-de-maȋtre of a book, one that speaks to the issues of property, consent, contracts and how bodies become things both to be let out, and let in . . . A dark, addictive and deceptively erudite read