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All That Is Solid
First we’ll get the Poles, then we get the gays …
These are the words Gosia hears as she heads home from a night out with friends. It’s the summer of 2016 and London is simmering with tension after the Brexit referendum. She is Polish-born and a Londoner for most of her adult life, but now she feels like a stranger in the place she calls home. Nothing is certain anymore; even the ground beneath her feet and the surface where she rests her hand feel unstable and likely to dissolve. Though she takes part in demonstrations, she feels very much alone. When her friend Ilona suggests therapy to help her face her fears, Gosia decides to have a go. It couldn’t hurt… could it?
Rosanne Rabinowitz’s compelling novelette ranges through activism and art therapy to the reality of city life to present a portrait of Brexit Britain, capturing a moment in time and a period in history.
These are the words Gosia hears as she heads home from a night out with friends. It’s the summer of 2016 and London is simmering with tension after the Brexit referendum. She is Polish-born and a Londoner for most of her adult life, but now she feels like a stranger in the place she calls home. Nothing is certain anymore; even the ground beneath her feet and the surface where she rests her hand feel unstable and likely to dissolve. Though she takes part in demonstrations, she feels very much alone. When her friend Ilona suggests therapy to help her face her fears, Gosia decides to have a go. It couldn’t hurt… could it?
Rosanne Rabinowitz’s compelling novelette ranges through activism and art therapy to the reality of city life to present a portrait of Brexit Britain, capturing a moment in time and a period in history.
36 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2019
2 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 7, 2019
Thoroughly enjoyed this single story chapbook which packs so much - Brexit, anxiety, atoms & therapy - in so few pages. A neat dissection of dissociation against a background of dissonance.
January 28, 2021
ALL THAT IS SOLID by Rosanne Rabinowitz
“She ends up at the busy bus stop on Kingsway in front of a Wetherspoons. But that’s the chain with the Brexit beer mats.”
I, too, have not been in a Wetherspoons since June 2016; one can’t say it enough. Put it in all fiction and I will quote it in all my reviews.
This is an engaging but anxiety-ridden story about two friends, well-characterised women of relatively dissimilar ages who have made their home in Britain for some while now. We are allowed to empathise allusively with each of their points of view, as one visits the other or vice versa in South London – powerfully so, in view of the story’s eventual ending within the nature of this book’s gestalt. Two women who feel excoriated by Brexit. And by all Brexit’s barbed accoutrements. The Brexitwire borders as an art installation in a theatre of cruelties, where only the worst can happen, as a fear fulfilled. This story will stay with me for a long time. It has found its home in my brain. Perhaps only such telling fiction will remain there even when that brain becomes the otherwise unsolid space it is destined one day to become.
“She ends up at the busy bus stop on Kingsway in front of a Wetherspoons. But that’s the chain with the Brexit beer mats.”
I, too, have not been in a Wetherspoons since June 2016; one can’t say it enough. Put it in all fiction and I will quote it in all my reviews.
This is an engaging but anxiety-ridden story about two friends, well-characterised women of relatively dissimilar ages who have made their home in Britain for some while now. We are allowed to empathise allusively with each of their points of view, as one visits the other or vice versa in South London – powerfully so, in view of the story’s eventual ending within the nature of this book’s gestalt. Two women who feel excoriated by Brexit. And by all Brexit’s barbed accoutrements. The Brexitwire borders as an art installation in a theatre of cruelties, where only the worst can happen, as a fear fulfilled. This story will stay with me for a long time. It has found its home in my brain. Perhaps only such telling fiction will remain there even when that brain becomes the otherwise unsolid space it is destined one day to become.
December 26, 2019
Around every corner, an abyss yawns. Sod's law rules: Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. Just in case she needs to know:
How to escape from killer bees.
How to perform a tracheostomy.
How to land a plane.
But the most important worst-case scenario is missing: What do you do when you might be uprooted from the country where you've lived most of your adult life?
- All That is Solid.
Writers like Rosanne Rabinowitz are more important in this political climate than ever.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews