Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction: Never Was by H. Gareth Gavin is the best-written book on the shortlist
* See the other books considered * Read a passage from our pick *
The Goldsmiths Prize was established in 2013 to celebrate the qualities of creative daring associated with the College and to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form. The annual prize of £10,000 is awarded to a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best.
This is the strongest shortlist of the year to date, and we recommend every one of these books for the quality of the writing.
The best-written of these is
The party was, as by then they always were, an afterparty. Bodies clawed the tiles and crawled crablike into the garden, which lilted down from the mansion’s terrace, which sank into the lilac sunrise. Beyond the garden where the beach began, actual crabs maneuvered between scraps of plastic and antique condoms, some of which had become tangled with the crabs’ rear legs, and now trailed behind them like latex bridal trains. The crabs made good brides somehow, though it did not seem as if there was anything or anybody they were marrying – their maneuvers had no future; they fussed and bustled for nothing but the fun and cruelty of fussing and bustling.
Some bodies from the party, those that had been able to crawl far enough, watched the crabs. Then they stopped and watched the sea instead. The waves heaped heavily. The foam that gushed from them was thick and glutinous, melting with jellyfish, and everywhere decorated with polymer ornaments – bottle caps and bottle cap grips, weed-kissed Tupperware, vibrantly-coloured shampoo microbeads. The bodies watching could not see the microbeads, but they could taste them – for the sea air, by then, was made of them.
Part hallucination, part queer bildungsroman, Never Was is a beautifully strange novel about grief, addiction and working-class masculinity, taking us from a limbo of lost dreams to a small salt-mining town and exploring the way identity is both inherited and re-invented.
Daniel sits on a clifftop in the aftermath of a party at Fin's mansion, looking out over a junky sea. Daniel's not sure why they're there, or who Fin is, even though Fin seems to be somebody famous. To find out, Daniel must tell Fin the story of their childhood, going back to a small salt-mining town in The North, a visit from their now-estranged cousin Crystal, and the life and losses of their salt-miner father, Mika.
Taking us from bus shelters to playgrounds to McDonalds, from the depth of a salt mine to a nightclub toilet, Daniel describes their world of soap operas, sunglasses, newspaper clippings and Princess Diana, steering Fin through the events that led up to The Great Subsidence, when their town and the mine that sustained it collapsed. As Daniel tells their story, they come to learn they're in a place called Never Was, a limbo for lost dreams and disappointments, a landfill for things that never came to be, but also a place of change and transition.
Dreamy, poignant, and revelatory, Never Was is a bold and inventive novel by an inimitable voice in literary fiction.
Disagree with our pick from the Goldsmiths shortlist, or any other pick? Email us at auraist@substack.com, quoting the opening 300 words of your recommended novel.