With its ruthless concision and artful mysteries, Kathryn Scanlan's Kick the Latch is lightning in a bottle.
Based on transcribed interviews with Sonia, a horse trainer, the novel vividly captures the
arc of one woman's life at the racetrack – the flat land and ramshackle backstretch; the bad feelings and friction; the winner's circle and the racetrack bar; the fancy suits and fancy boots; and the 'particular language' of 'grooms, jockeys, trainers, racing secretaries, stewards, pony people, hotwalkers, everybody' – with economy and integrity.
As Scanlan puts it, 'I wanted to preserve – amplify, exaggerate – Sonia's idiosyncratic speech, her bluntness, her flair as a storyteller. I arrived at what you could call a composite portrait of a self.'
Whittled down with a fiercely singular artistry, Kick the Latch bangs out of the starting gate and carries the reader on a careening joyride around the inside track.
'A revelation in its unadorned, unromantic, plain power.' Andrew McMillan
'It's a landscape full of exhausting labor and habitual violence, but also ecstatic devotion and joy . . . Scanlan writes about ordinary life in extraordinary ways.' Leslie Jamison, New Yorker
'I was absolutely blown away . . . A finely wrought work of art that takes one person's life and expands it to create something wondrous and universal. The pages I read seemed to capture all that is vital to human existence.' Tash Aw
'Kick the Latch comes at you fast, and is a hell of a ride. I loved it.' Jon McGregor
'Pure exhilaration. No one works with fineness, with exactitude, with the beating heart of fiction and of life, quite like Kathryn Scanlan.' Amina Cain
'Superb . . . Niche and precise in the revelation of an ordinary life (Johnson's Train Dreams, or Seethaler's A Whole Life) with the distillation of Lydia Davis.' Sinéad Gleeson
'Revelatory . . . every word is essential.' Amy Hempel
'A wonderfully empathic window opened onto a fascinating life lived on the margins.' Eric Banks
'Performs the trick of turning a life . . . into art, and does so with particular charm, will, and intensity.' Lucie Elven