Sterling Karat Gold

Exciting to read a serious critique of detention centres, racism & transphobia by way of time travel via google streetview, the renegade fashion of Nasir Mazhar & guerrilla performance art. I'm so glad writing like this exists

Their third novel, Sterling Karat Gold confirms what was already apparent from Gaudy Bauble and We are Made of Diamond Stuff: Isabel Waidner is contemporary literary fiction’s most exciting and vital author."I'm Sterling. Lost my father to AIDS, my mother to alcoholism. Lost my country to conservativism, my language to PTSD. Got this England, though. Got this body, this Sterling heart."This is an extraordinarily imaginative story - managing to pack into its brief length ideas such as time travelling via Google maps, Franz Beckenbauer and Justin Fashanu, some wonderfully imaginative fashion, bullfighters, cuties which come alive from a Beach Boys album cover, Robert H. Colescott’s painting The End of the Trail and animals from Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.But along with this brilliantly-portayed, and also moving, story, Waidner’s novel has some important things to say about identity, belonging and state-sanctioned intolerance of those deemed to be ‘others’ ("black, foreign, gay, trans or working-class female".)A novel that is truly novel, in the best sense of the word, remoulding the form to its own purposes.

5*