What a strange book this is. The back cover copy tells me that this is fiction, but also memoir and history, and it's somehow all three of those things at once. Her website says this about it:

It doesn't have any of the hallmarks of what we would normally describe as a novel, even by the loose definition that literary fiction sometimes takes - there are no characters to speak of other than the narrator, no plot, no dialogue, no real forward motion or sense of 'things happening'. And yet to be a memoir or be a history book it should probably tell us some concrete things about the author or a period in time, and it doesn't really do that either. (It does reveal a lot about the narrator, but whether that narrator is actually the author is entirely unclear.)

This is a very fragmented reflection on what it means to be alive, human, wman, sexual, white, (probably) middle class, to own things, to exist under capitalism. The structure is very simple - the narrator is given or observes an item in her life, and this sparks a series of reflections about events from her past. These often delve into the most mundane, base elements of human existence - there are multiple relfections on the act of taking a shit, for example - juxtaposed with thoughts about torture, rape, and war crimes.

It's complex and strange and defies categorisation while feeling very honest and vulnerable. I won't say I enjoyed it but I definitely liked it, and I see why it's up for the Goldsmiths Prize. This is one I'll be thinking about for a while