Set in a near future fraught with ecological collapse, Landscapes brilliantly explores memory, empathy, preservation, and art as an instrument for recollection and renewal.
In the English countryside—decimated by heat and drought—Penelope archives what remains of an estate’s once notable collection. As she catalogues the library’s contents, she keeps a diary of her final months in the dilapidated country house that has been her home for two decades and a refuge for those who have been displaced by disasters. Out of necessity, Penelope and her partner, Aidan, have sold the house and its scheduled demolition marks the pressing deadline for completing the archive. But with it also comes the impending return of Aidan’s brother, Julian, at whose hands Penelope suffered during a brief but violent relationship twenty-two years before. As Julian’s visit looms, Penelope finds herself unable to suppress the past, and she clings to art as a means of understanding, of survival, and of reckoning.
Recalling the works of Rachel Cusk and Kazuo Ishiguro, Landscapes is an elegiac and spellbinding blend of narrative, essay, and diary that reinvents the pastoral and the country house novel for our age of catastrophe, and announces the arrival of an extraordinarily gifted new writer.
This is an extraordinary work—a contemplative novel set in a postapocalyptic landscape, that meditates on painting, specifically J.M.W Turner’s ruins. The diary running through, both archiving the past as well as cataloguing the natural world, is reminiscent of Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall as well as Derek Jarman’s gardening journals, in their devastation and slow beauty. Christine Lai’s exquisite speculative fiction as art criticism should be read alongside Ayşegül Savaş, Amina Cain, Maria Gainza, and Judith Schalansky.”
—Kate Zambreno, author of Drifts and The Light Room
A haunting, hypnotic novel that collapses the distances between violence and beauty, horror and longing, art and decay. I was completely absorbed in its nuanced, atmospheric world, at once familiar and menacingly strange, and I am astonished by Christine Lai’s vision.”
—Ayşegül Savaş, author of White on White and Walking on the Ceiling
Gentle and wise, intimate and atmospheric, elegant and impressionistic, at the center of Landscapes is a question that is almost always on my mind now. What do we do with art, with beauty, in a time of crisis and collapse?”
— Amina Cain, author of A Horse at Night and Indelicacy
For all its eerily ephemeral worldbuilding, its quiet ruined setting, Landscapes is a raw-nerve of a novel. In a love letter to and elegy for disappearing art in a disappearing world, Christine Lai has managed to lay bare the mechanics of loss, both personal and communal. The result is a masterful inspection of what it means to live through decay, to grasp, amidst so much loss, the unreliable lifeboat of memory. A transcendent, achingly beautiful debut.”
—Omar El Akkad, Giller Prize-winning author of What Strange Paradise and American War
In deft movements triangulating possession, loss, and memory, Lai’s meditative accounting of lives and culture in violent displacement and ruination feels like a witnessing of our probable path through the years ahead, in which all may be uncertain but the human will to repair and rebuild.”
—Pitchaya Sudbanthad, author of Bangkok Wakes to Rain
A marvelous, deeply intelligent novel about art, and ruins, and loss – and the stubborn, beautiful human urge to never give up. Christine Lai’s Landscapes shimmers in the mind’s eye, long after the last page has been turned. Wonderful.”
—Steven Price, author of Lampedusa
This is a novel engaged in inventive, intelligent, challenging conversation with the literature of the past, while presenting a clear-eyed and prescient vision of the future. Lai writes gorgeously of transience and decay, capturing the aesthetic ecstasy and redemptive power of art while interrogating its role in a crumbling and unjust world. A bold and rewarding debut.”
—Kim Fu author of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
An exquisite debut about art and desire, love and deceit, reminiscent of A.S. Byatt in its richly researched and deeply compelling story and prose.”
—Lee Henderson, author of Disintegration in Four Parts
In an apocalyptic future that feels eerily familiar in its prescience, two characters, their pasts woven together and marked by an act of unspeakable violence, make their way back together across space and time, their memories mediated through observations about art, music and architecture… Landscapes is a propulsive read that teems with tension and pathos. With captivating and crystalline prose, Lai weaves art criticism, feminist theory and epistolary writing to maximum effect, the result a work that is haunting, prismatic and utterly engrossing. Stunningly brilliant and intricately observed, Landscapes is an astonishing debut.”
—Jasmine Sealy, author of The Island of Forgetting
A powerful meditation on the aliveness of art, and the myriad ways in which our most meaningful experiences coalesce in the world of things. Set in a world falling to ruin, Lai deftly conjures a prismatic lens through which the consequences of obsession and neglect can be viewed. An elegant novel with an urgent undertow, Landscapes is a potent reminder of what it means to be a custodian: of the planet, of our own creations, and of each other. An impressive debut from a singular voice, Landscapes is a rewarding read—as resonant and tonally rich as the works by Turner that haunt its core.”
—Aislinn Hunter, author of The Certainties
Christine Lai 