When I tell you that poet Ella Frears’s new “novelistic text” takes the form of one long email to a landlord, you might balk. You shouldn’t: Goodlord is a dazzling treat of a book, genuinely inventive, spiky and funny. Despite not having much of a plot – a young woman complains to her estate agent about the degradations of the housing market and what it means to be a young woman – Goodlord zips along, blackly compelling and readable.
The email thing is almost a gimmick, the tiny subtitle on the chic cover a hook with which to catch the curious bookshop-browser. The stream-of-consciousness text is laid out more like a long poem than anything more epistolatory (Frears’s 2020 poetry collection Shine, Darling was shortlisted for the Forward and TS Eliot prizes).
