Ruins, Child

by Giada Scodellaro

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. Giada Scodellaro's novel is like a precious old dropped, looking up at you, flashing light and bits of the undeniable. With the pulsating sway of its liquid mosaic narrative, the novel may recall Virginia Woolf's 
The Waves, but is entirely its own kaleidoscopic, pointedly disorienting in its looseness, and powered along by snatches of speech from its compelling ensemble cast, often vernacular, often overheard. It's a book seemingly drawn from deep wells of Black American Scodellaro's female protagonists push back against authority in the very vivacity of their telling, setting afoot a freeing-up and a mysterious inversion of marginalization. A surreal musing, 
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.

Genres: Fiction, Library Science, The United States Of America

128 pages, Paperback

Published April 7, 2026

About the author

Giada Scodellaro was born in Naples, Italy and raised in the Bronx, New York. Giada’s writings have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New Yorker, BOMB, Harper’s, Granta, and The Chicago Review of Books, among other publications. Giada is a recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, and is the inaugural Tables of Contents Regenerative Residency fellow. Her debut collection, "Some of Them Will Carry Me" (Dorothy, a publishing project), was named one of the New Yorker’s best books of 2022. She is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University. Winner of The Novel Prize, Giada's debut novel, "Ruins, Child", will be simultaneously published by New Directions (US), Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK), and Giramondo (AU) in early 2026.

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes I enter into an experimental work such as Scodellaro's and struggle to find a way in, struggle to latch onto anything that orients me in the slightest and I'm left floundering. And then other times, despite the fractured form, despite the fact that I don't truly know what's going on--I'm absorbed, the words, the sentences, and their inability to cohere into anything we would deem "standard" no longer hinder but excite me, remind me of the truly Original forms that a novel can take. All of that to say, Ruins, Child left me feeling like the latter.

As I was reading, books like Ravn's The Employees and Dutton's Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other came to mind and admittedly it took me a second to recognize the ekphrastic nature that connects these three works. Ruins, Child opens with a group of people watching a film, a seemingly never-ending film, of their younger selves and voices emit from the present and the past and thus the reader is introduced to this intentional community, the reader watching them just as they are watching themselves and sometimes even watching themselves watch their past selves watch something else.

It's a layered, collage-like vision of a near future, snippets of dialogue mixing with descriptions of this film, of the urban architecture and its relationship with the natural landscape. It's rich in intertextual references and analysis of scenes from films such as Berry Gordy's Mahogany. It's a hard book to describe, it conjures feelings more than a story, it's lively and intimate while remaining detached, one feels as if they are immersed within an art installation, full of moving pieces and montages, of sounds and visuals that summon a memorial of sorts, an honoring of a way of life, of a community that no longer retains the dimensions of decades past, but persists nonetheless.

Certainly not for everyone, but I enjoyed getting lost in its dizzying pages.

[Britt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A story in the form of montage that meditates on friendship, community, fragility, and beauty at the end of the world. Loved the resonances with Toni Cade Barbara’s The Salt Eaters, another beautifully hypnotic and experimental narrative. Highly recommend.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

And the audience doesn't really understand much of what is going on. The editing is chaotic. Though we do know how the trees were used for violence/are still used, we do know what Alice Coltrane was plucking her fingers raw about, goddamn, a child says

Ruins, Child by Giada Scodellaro was winner of the 2024 Novel Prize 'a biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English by published and unpublished writers around the world. It offers $10,000 to the winner and simultaneous publication in North America by New York-based New Directions, in the UK and Ireland by the London-based Fitzcarraldo Editions, and in Australia and New Zealand by the Sydney-based publisher Giramondo. The prize rewards novels which explore and expand the possibilities of the form, and are innovative and imaginative in style.'

And this novel certainly fulfils that brief - were the author British, it would be a strong Goldsmiths contender - although the form of the work makes for a disorientating read, what I tend to think of as a One Eyes Scissor novel.

The novel centres around (I think) seven women (that the blurb says six, perhaps to the dual nature of two of the characters, is somewhat symptomatic) is an apartment tower complex in what, from street names, must be the Bronx in New York. Foremost amongst them in Vonetta!, aka the Mother, aka the woman!, aka fast!:

Vonetta!, though the neighbors call her something else entirely (fast!), and we mostly refer to her as she exists (the woman!). Oh, but I don't like to be reduced.
It's Vonetta!, she says when she introduces herself to any man or woman, or child. With an exclamation point at the end, the woman continues, an aircraft moving past.
Some stragglers have joined, they adjust themselves on the carpeted floor, finding a free space, or a gap, the arm of the plastic couch. They sit up straight to watch this thirty year old film. Vonetta!, this is how the name is written on the birth certificate, I can show it to you, though it might fall apart a little more in our hands, yellowed.
Vonetta!, the woman explains, is the name given by my mother to prepare me for bow I would be called out, or bow I would be erected, enacted, blamed. The punctuation at the end like a nail left in a wall.

The form of the novel includes a chorus of different voices; recurrent themes (e.g. the burning down of the local school); a description of a film made about the women; a section of poetry, or broken prose; and a description of tape sounds. The contents include commentary on urban and landscape architecture, as well as the socio-economic situation of the collective. And the originality and invention of the form it itself part of the novel's message - a rebuttal of the status quo:

Keep the existing pipes, to sustain what's already in place and keep it functioning is okay. To maintain the status quo is fine. To be a journalist is alright, but to be a revolutionary is not. The downstairs neighbor is a journalist.
Inventing is akin to sinning!, the journalist neighbor, Bobby (real name Bubba) likes to say while washing his clothes in the laundry room.
Invention is akin to sinning!, the high-schoolers say on their way to the school building. The school building has been burnt down to its foundation.
A politician is okay, Vonetta! continues. An actress can use her role to reflect the norms of society or some of the violence. A seamstress can mend, sure. It's okay to mend or fix things, to hammer them together; that is allowed. In other words, to take care of (in minor ways) the objects or people that need tending to is encouraged. But creating something altogether new-no. No. To be innovative is to be out of line, darling. 'Things are meant to break' the government says, 'there is divinity in what is broken and in the broken is the divine!

The orange sky, the orange sky is reflected in the lake and in the cars moving past. From up top, from this height here there is the impression of stillness. From the second highest floor of the tallest apartment building there is absence.

Fascinating if somewhat bewildering - 3.5 stars.

[Rob Boylan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not gonna lie: I've never been hugely comfortable writing about race. Growing up in Brooklyn, you do quickly get comfortable around all races, colors and religions -- or at least most of us do, otherwise you suffer for your inability to get along. But writing about it when you've pretty much just been a spectator is another thing entirely. What's my right? Where's my place? On whose authority? I don't know.

But I do know Giada Scodellaro has achieved something extraordinary with her beguiling, experimental debut novel, Ruins, Child.

It’s set at an uncertain future date, in a New York City that's either sinking or facing rising seas, in a crumbling Harlem. This New York is beset by neither robots nor aliens, nor nuclear war, just climate change and human bullshit: the lingering ghosts of poverty and racism that stick around to the bitter end.

The novel tells the story of a film -- sometimes of a film within a film -- tracking the lives of a group of black women braving this new inescapable world in the same apartment. Vonetta! (yes with an exclamation point), who’s been pregnant for going on forty, fifty, sixty years now, is the oldest and sorta ringleader of this older group the film is about; and then there is the younger generation, of whom several (Jackie, Beryl and Seret) are the making the film.

The novel’s film seems to take the shape of the Up documentary series, which started filming subjects at age 7 in 1964 and continued to check in on them every 7 years, right up to age 70 in 2026. But for the women in the book, much seems to be in stasis: Vonetta’s pregnancy won’t come to term; she’s overqualified for the jobs she keeps losing; Harlem seems to be one of if not the last populated neighborhood because no one can afford to do more than dream of leaving like the rest of the city.

More than the story, it’s the novel’s hypnotic rhythm that sucked me in though. The structure, the thought pattern, even the digressions to critique films the three filmmakers are watching along the way, are all electric on the page. It’s exciting stuff to read.

[Hannah · Rating 2 out of 5]

May need to revisit this in the future… possibly with a physical copy and not during finals week. But I might have just not enjoyed it lol.

[Reisse Myy Fredericks · Rating 5 out of 5]

This work surpasses easy categorization: loosely dystopian, heavily vernacular, and ingeniously original. The best I can describe it is as novelistic counterpart to “Wheatfield: A Confrontation” by artist Agnes Denes, carrying similar conceptual themes of ruin, labor, ecology, and design.

[Chanel Chapters]

Writing style not for me

[Harry Smith]

A rich tapestry.

----
Would I not know a thing that covers?

The neighbors have always covered their domestic possessions with textiles, material to help maintain things, or to help their shit not fall apart. This is the reason for the shag carpeting, the plastic coverings. Everyone is afraid for things to become elastic.

There is something to be said about looking down from a high place

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Felt experimental for the sake of being experimental

[Jack Bowman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a jarring, voyeuristic, and poetic read which throws the reader fragments of narrative but largely relies on feeling. There are fleeting moments of beauty, judgement, and emotion as we watch these six Black women exist, reflect, and reflect on those reflections. It’s billed as a breaking of the form and it certainly feels that way, often with exciting and raw results, although at times it feels like Scodellaro shatters it too far, almost beyond repair, with parts feeling overly laboured and arduous or self-indulgent. More an experiment than the finished formula then, but definitely one I enjoyed a lot.

[Xaanua · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nueva lectura de los libros elegibles a los International Booker Prize 2027, y un libro muy difícil de categorizar por la forma en que combina estilos diferentes: un estilo visual, descriptivo, rítmico en ocasiones. Se trata de un libro experimental, en el que no hay fronteras de estilos, y en el que cuesta encontrar el hilo conductor, pero pese a eso, uno admira la creatividad para ir construyendo la historia, para ir hilvanando historias de diferentes mujeres, en las que se habla de maternidad, de machismo, de cine, y que incluye referencias cinematográficas y literarias. No se trata de un libro para grandes audiencias, pero sí es un libro con una voz propia, fuerte y original.
La novela transcurre en un futuro indeterminado, aunque muy cercano al presente, en un edificio de apartamentos en ruinas situado en un centro urbano, que parece recordar al Bronx neoyorquino.
La historia comienza con unas personas viendo una película, y nos va introduciendo poco a poco a la comunidad, a las mujeres, y el lector se convierte en un observador del entorno de ellas, de la vida de ellas. La autora juega, en cierta forma, con la cuarta pared tan cinematográfica: esa gente se ve a sí misma más joven, al mismo tiempo que el lector lee, y ve las vidas de ellas.
A lo largo de las páginas hay comentarios incluso acerca de la forma de dirigir, la mirada de la cámara, y que revela cierto machismo, cierta mirada masculina, a la hora de mirar a la mujer. El capítulo que más me gustó, fue el centrado en la maternidad: el dolor del partido y la mirada masculina a ese momento, a esa intimidad, y la reflexión hacia la propia maternidad.
Una de las dificultades para abordar la historia es que no hay un time line clara, no es una historia lineal, sino fragmentada, compuesta de escenas, diálogos fragmentados, descripciones, frases, palabras, que tiene un tono rítmico a veces, otras prosaico, y que va llevando al lector por diferentes episodios no conectados entre sí, hay incendios, hay edificios abandonados, mujeres que se apoyan entre sí, que se escuchan, para hablar de feminidad, de cuidados, de la vejez, de la memoria, de la supervivencia, donde predomina el colectivo frente al individuo. En ese sentido, en la colectividad, me ha recordado un poco a mi última lectura: Animal spiral.
¿Cuál es el mensaje de la obra? Tras terminar la lectura uno se pregunta qué está reivindicando la autora. Y creo que es probable que reivindique la figura femenina, las grandes olvidas de la historia, que reivindique la comunidad, el grupo humano, como memoria de la propia historia del mundo. La historia tiene tantas capas, que puede dar lugar a muchas interpretaciones, diferentes: desde la opresión, la pasividad del Estado ante el estado en que se encuentran los edificios en los que transcurre la obra.
En resumen, una voz poderosa, con un gran trabajo de creatividad detrás: incluye fragmentos de películas y libros, los cuales se insertan de una forma muy creativa. Y, sobre todo, una novela, cuyo estilo, te atrapa, y cuesta despegarse de él tras su lectura.

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 3 out of 5]

This must be one of the most arcane and esoteric works of literature I have ever came across. A multitude of voices define the novel as is well introduced by the blurb: Set in what may be the future, and centered 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. The multitude of voices seem like flashing bits of light that characterize the pulsating sway of a liquid mosaic narrative. The narrative is at once dense in its stream-of-consciousness manner, as well as being loosely rendered to become an almost disorienting experience. It is surreal and experimental at the same time characterized by snatches of speech from its cast of characters, a description of a woman's film, a section of poetry (or even broken prose???), a description of tape sounds- to become at once an ethnography of place and socio-economics as well as an ode to communal ruins and architecture. Unclassifiable and abstruse in its literary temperament, this novel is certainly a bizarre origami of sorts!

[Axel Koch · Rating 2 out of 5]

I know there's a decent section of references and signifiers that I'm missing out on here because the life experience of the author is different from the one that I, as a White European man, have had, and I absolutely do not mean to imply that Scodellaro should have pandered more to my demographic with this book. However, I harbour deep doubts as to how comprehensible Ruins, Child would be even for a Black (or mixed race) American woman - the barrier of entry that Scodellaro's obtuse, fragmented, and deliberately unforthcoming poetry/prose hybrid presents to the reader is surely so high as to render her story highly inaccessible and at times fully unintelligible. I will say that it benefits somewhat from being read aloud, as this brings out the prosody in Scodellaro's words a bit more, but my bottom line is that if a White male author came out with this, we would rightfully be calling it a pretentious mess, so let's not lose ourselves in meaningless platitudes about localised experiential value and whatnot just because the writer is a woman of colour.

[Brett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This reads more like a series of too clear photographs, or packaged-up emotions, then a narrative story. It delivers a lived sense of its characters in a way far deeper. But the book is experimental and difficult at times, often recursive. 

"The bosom is just the fruit, a child whispers, though it is true that there are those who will make a fuss over a breast.

As an audience we convince ourselves that when a breast is shown onscreen it is meant to unmoor, or to provide nostalgia. This is meant to unmoor, we say. Misogyny allows for this, but Mona doesn’t mind, she accepts the extra cash offered to her, $250.

Vonetta! offers to expose her breasts too (small), what for that fee, you can see these hills too, she says, laughing. Who’s funding this? and she unclasps her bra with one hand. The branch from a paper birch tree will be overlaid upon Vonetta!’s modest bosom, the director says. She flashes her modest bosom, and the branch from a paper birch tree is overlaid upon them."

[Jonathan K · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well, what to make of that? A dystopian tale of a female community that is always on guard, always watched either through film or by other generations or men. At times it felt like Scodellaro had consumed vast amounts of LSD and written in a stream of consciousness style that left me with a headache. Doubtless a talented author, this required a lot of effort not to DNF and, although I am glad I finished it, it did little for me. Sorry.

[Aden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Challenging, consistently fascinating, excellent experimental fiction. I was holding onto every word of this. It's weirdness, ecological backbone, ekphrasis-esque storytelling matches many of my novel interests. Strongly recommend, especially if you're looking for something a bit off the beaten path.

[Abby]

Pretty, poetry-like prose. Most of the references/works the novel was in conversation with I do not know, so those went straight over my head. As well the novel provides a very constrained view of its subjects (the legs, the feet, etc.) and shifting perspectives, so that the reader gets a collage of the world as opposed to a clear image.

3.5 ⭐️

[madeline]

Miserably pretentious. I'm not going to say "its just not for me" because being purposefully obtuse to hide a lack of substance within flowery prose should not be for anyone. Why did this get published?

[Dayi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very, very, very worth your time if you are interested in interdisciplinary storytelling drawing from film, prose and poetry and merging them in creative ways. Intimate because it is so bold and unforgiving of itself in terms of how far and how precise it wants to go. Strongly recommend.

[Kieran · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dystopian, yet there's reflections of reality. It's poetry, without being poetry. It's art. This is the one piece of writing lately that I've thought while reading, "this is art." That is how I would describe it. Art. In its rawest, purest form. It's a fantastic read.

[DeeJaH J...! · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unlike anything I've read before....

P.S. Not for readers who do not like descriptive reads....

[Thomas Lingham · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite hard work. I'm taking away some fractured and confused yet striking images of characters and locations, but, really, no idea what was going on.

[Jtoastp · Rating 1 out of 5]

I just could not engage with this book whatsoever and found its format overdone preventing any sort of connection with the material

[Samira · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love the aesthetic of this re structure, the pictures and the cover but I had no idea what was going on

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Surreal and evocative, in a manner quite reminiscent of Delaney's Dhalgren, to my mind, while remaining distinctly its own work.

[Djinn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Possibly the most surreal book I've ever read (complimentary). I wanted to stay in the tiny pockets of that world a little longer and try to understand more about what was going on.

[Nick McLaren · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this I felt utterly lost - Like standing in the middle of an art installation uttering the shameful words ‘I dont know art…but I know what I like’

Reminded me of Lanark. In both senses.

[vicky · Rating 5 out of 5]

confusing as hell. Loved it. reminds me of home

[Sue Gould]

Some interesting language and word pictures but very fragmented - stream of consciousness - I struggled to follow, make sense, engage.

[Bryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A certain vibe came through...but besides that, I didn't understand this book at all. Not for me. Also...it's really weird Sanaa Lathan is in it as a character? I think?