GOODLORD: AN EMAIL
Taking the form of one long email addressed to an estate agent, Goodlord is a fictional memoir of habitation, a genre-defying novelistic text that beautifully evokes the people and places of our lives—the spaces of work, those that may or may not be ‘home’, sites of trauma and ecstasy. Showing all the control of voice one would expect from a poet of her rare skill, Ella Frears has created a book that is as funny as it is harrowing, and beautifully skewers the contemporary housing crisis while questioning the fundamental desires, drivers and disappointments that lie at the heart of our obsession with ‘property’.
Shortlisted for the 2024 Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection.
Reviews
A trailblazing, genre-defying coup-de-maître of a book, one that speaks to the issues of property, consent, contracts, and how bodies become things both to be let out, and let in. A dark, addictive and deceptively erudite read.
All the hot women I know have Ella Frears on their bedside table.
A witty, indignant and poignant look at the way our desire for a place to call home has been misshapen and distorted by the morbid pathologies of the market.
Frears retains her poet’s eye for the memorable phrase — “a lovely flatline of a summer”. But she also deploys a rarer gift, tackling grand themes — property, misogyny, justice — without preaching or ranting.
Frears's writing is like lightning - fast, crackling and illuminating.
Calling to mind Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, a dreamy poetic opus written in 24 hours, GOODLORD is a moreish contemporary epic as email.
(A) haunting and darkly hilarious debut novel. It’s Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground reimaged for the renting generation.
GOODLORD: AN EMAIL by Ella Frears is brilliant - so many lingering images & emotions, so familiar & uncanny.
GOODLORD is brilliantly original and fabulously entertaining.
I just couldn’t stop reading it. Fierce, wild, scathing energy.
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