Ella Frears is an artist and poet whose debut collection Shine, Darling was shortlisted for the T S Eliot and Forward Prizes. Goodlord is her first longform fiction - a fierce, dark, funny and addictively readable novel told via one long email to an estate agent.
'It's Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground reimaged for the renting generation' Emily Dinsdale, DAZED
Goodlord is a fierce, dark, funny and addictively readable novel told via one long email to an estate agent.
Asked by letting agent, Ava, to make an account with the ominous sounding property technology 'Goodlord', our narrator launches into a breathless and rage fuelled reply that swings wildly between anecdotes of chaotic house-shares, grubby university halls, the claustrophobic school days that haunt her still, her various underpaid exploitative jobs at pubs and restaurants, relationships and sexual encounters both troubling and ecstatic, and an artists' residency that offers her the space she craves but demands a complicated transaction in return.
Written in sharp, unflinching prose, Goodlord exposes the grinding inequalities of modern life. It is a blistering exploration of what it means to live in a world where everything, including your dignity, comes with a price tag.
'ALL THE HOT WOMEN I KNOW HAVE ELLA FREARS ON THEIR BEDSIDE TABLES' Sheena Patel
'A dazzling treat of a book, genuinely inventive, spiky and funny' Holly Williams, Observer
'As compelling as any thriller' Graeme Richardson, Sunday Times
