Giada Scodellaro
Ruins, Child
Giramondo Publishing, 2025
Ruins, Child by Giada Scodellaro is the 2024 winner of The Novel Prize, previously won by Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken and Tell by Jonathan Buckley.
Set in what may be the future, and centred 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. With the pulsating sway of its liquid mosaic narrative, Giada Scodellaro’s debut 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 which seems to be 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 marginalisation. ‘Looseness, that is the thing people fear in a person (in women) and in objects.’ Ruins, Child uses the lens of urban infrastructure, social commentary, folklore, choreography, and collective listening to create an ethnography of place and an ode to communal ruins.
“Giada Scodellaro is one of the most astonishing writers of her generation and Ruins, Child is a visionary novel. Scodellaro refracts and redefines the canon of Black culture, the archive of Black experience. The result is a masterpiece that lives and breathes on the page, every sentence shimmering with wit, musicality, brilliance and verve.”
About the Author
Giada Scodellaro is the author of the collection Some of Them Will Carry Me(Dorothy, a publishing project), named one of the New Yorker’s best books of 2022. She is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University. Winner of The Novel Prize, her debut novel, Ruins, Child, will be simultaneously published by New Directions (US), Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK), and Giramondo (AU) in February 2026.