Poor Baby

One of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 2023

For readers of Claire-Louise Bennett, Gwendoline Riley, and Rachel Cusk, a modern Gothic in which a woman newly arrived to a vast estate finds herself besieged by mysterious letters, resonant silences, and the uncanny persistence of history.

At first Emil and I did not know about the big house. Or if we knew about it, we did not think about it, hidden as it was from Westermoy. It was impossible to get an unbroken view of any part of the building, not left to right, not up or down. Sane, not sane, houses such as this one held gravity differently than other buildings.

A woman and her partner arrive at a gamekeeper’s cottage deep in the woods to begin a new life. There, they will undertake an ambitious regenerative agriculture project on behalf of the estate—observing mosses and lichens, planting birch and aspen trees, developing plans to reclaim polluted soils. They learn that soon they will also have their first child.

But even from the first happy evening of their arrival, there are spaces where the woman does not like to tread: an anteroom she passes as quickly as she can, a corner in the raised beds where nothing grows, a glasshouse where she invariably feels watched. Then Emil is called away on business, and letters begin to arrive—strange intimations about the estate, thickets of claim and counterclaim.

They came to Westermoy to get out ahead of their panic, to try to live a “good life”—to focus on what was in front of them, work with their hands, water and mulch. But neither the garden walls nor the boundaries of the estate can contain what has already taken root. The future they are building must also, unavoidably, rest on the past.

A novel of thresholds, secrets, and silences, Poor Baby asks what is left of the world to inherit, and whether it is possible to live ethically within a system one wishes to disavow. It marks the US debut of a major voice in fiction: precise, intelligent, and bracingly new.