Shortlisted for the 2025 Goldsmiths Prize
I mean, look at where we are. I found my dead mother shoplifting in a department store and then we discovered that life is magic and she's our age stuck in our timeline somehow and she has no regard for us, and we have to track her down and stop ourselves from being born. Oh, and we might even die tonight. Hahahaha."
The Catch by Yrsa Daley-Ward, a debut novelist for a writer already known for her poetry and memoirs, is an intriguing and welcome inclusion on the Goldsmiths Prize's shortlist - a prize that, and I say this has someone who loves it, has at times seem skewed to London-based white, male, middle aged, literary-academic and relatively obscure authors.
It's also a novel that refuses to acknowledge genres - at times I felt I was reading popular fiction for the Insta-generation, at others a psychological thriller; the prose can be prosaic but at times poetic in form as well as language; as literary fiction the novel is explicitly meta-fictional, writing itself with books within the book; and it leaves explictly open whether the odd events the two twin (literally) narrators relate are a con trick, magical or simply imagined (a brilliant example of how to use the Todorovian fantastic in literature) - indeed if the narrators do converge on a view, the ending(s) suggest other interpretations.
Judge Simon Okotie called it well: “The Catch is an extraordinary shape-shifting, genre-defying work of fiction. Reading, by turns, as popular fiction, literary fiction and science fiction, it calls all such distinctions into question.” And something the author-twin in the novel echoes in her own work (which adds 'memoir' to the readings):
My previous books swam along quite nicely-nothing outstanding, but all respectable enough. The first was an anthology of prose and poetry from women of African descent, and the second was an anthology of selected essays by Black British writers of the last century. Both books did well in colleges and libraries and mostly kept me afloat, along with the odd brand deal or speaking engagements. This novel, though, shifted genres, shifted everything.
I called the book Evidence. Things were happening that no one would believe, so I wanted to have somewhere to harbor the facts. The booksellers are calling it autofiction, which is a laugh. Early reviewers said the plot was about time travel, which was, again, missing the point. It helped create buzz, so I didn't argue. I had planned to write a splashy, commercial story with a deft political message, a prize-winning thing lauded by critics, but the dark material arrived at my feet, dressed and ready to talk, hijacking all other possibilities. You have to let the spirit in, even if she's frightening. Even if she bursts rudely onto the scene, threatening to drown you.
Against that, I would have preferred a tighter work. The background plot, against which the main events unfold, particularly the inclusion of a story of a spiritual healer-cum-sex pest, added relatively little for me except to the page count and generally I was more grabbed by Clara's story than Dempsey's.
3.5 stars.