The Last Sane Woman
Published on 2. July 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
240 pages
978-1-80429-537-3 (ISBN)
Description
Nicola Long is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London. She begins to spend her hours at a small underfunded archive dedicated to women's art. There she discovers one side of a correspondence beginning in 1976 and spanning a dozen years, written from one woman - a ceramics graduate, uncannily like Nicola - to a friend living a contrasting and conventionally moored life. As Nicola reads on, an acute sense of affinity turns into obsession.
She abandons one job after another to make time for the archive. The litany of coincidences in the letters becomes uncanny, and Nicola's feeling of ownership begets a growing dread: should she be afraid of where these letters are leading?
She abandons one job after another to make time for the archive. The litany of coincidences in the letters becomes uncanny, and Nicola's feeling of ownership begets a growing dread: should she be afraid of where these letters are leading?
Reviews / Votes
Disquieting and gorgeous, The Last Sane Woman plucks images from the world with the claustrophobic pleasure of picking a scab. It reaches deep into the negative spaces of failure and precarity, and from these resources assembles something caustic, elegant, elusive and foreboding. It's also funny, with an offbeat, sly lightness that comes from knowing exactly how high the odds are stacked against you. I was hooked by the conversation between Regel's protagonists, looping across generations to give voice to the pains of making and the shameful pleasures of destruction. -- Daisy LaFarge, author of <i>Life without Air</i> and <i>Paul </i> The Last Sane Woman is a brilliant, slyly funny, and acutely observed meditation on the process both of the making of objects and of one's own life. Regel's prose is gorgeous and deftly rendered on every page. -- Sophie Mackintosh, author of <i>The Water Cure </i> In Regel's alluring debut novel a London art school graduate takes a job at a feminist archive and stumbles on a mystery buried in the collection ... a distinctive story of female friendship. * Publishers Weekly * Regel started out as a poet before turning to fiction, and the sharp aesthetic sense and ability to hold and distil a moment ... are present here, too. -- Holly Connolly * AnOther Magazine * Regel offers an unnerving and playfully pithy world, one in which dread is almost a fetish, tragedy an aesthetic, failure a form of entertainment. -- Kate Simpson * Telegraph * Regel understands the fine line between success and failure, the difficulties of producing meaningful art in a fickle world, and her book is a sensitive meditation on creativity and disconnection. -- Lucy Popescu * Observer * The Last Sane Woman is an evocative, aching riff on the epistolary tradition -- Rachel Vorona Cote * The Washington Post * In Regel's case, her poetry as well as her fiction gives the sensation of the author winking at you from behind the page -- Zsofia Paulikovics * Interview Magazine * Jaunty, warm and always sensitive...[Regel is] an author who can handle delicate subjects with assurance and charm. -- Magnus Rena * Literary Review * Moving, lyrical -- Martin Chilton * Independent * Regel possesses an impressive ability to make the familiar unfamiliar...Her sentences are lyrical and stunning-exactly what one hopes for from a poet-turned-novelist like herself, who was also co-editor of the feminist art journal SALT. The result is an exquisite, simultaneously comforting and uncanny representation of what it means to create, maintain community, and make a living amid our contemporary malaise, executed with the precision and delicacy of a potter at the wheel. -- Madeline Howard * Los Angeles Review of Books * The dog-ears and underlines in this reader's copy function as a miniature archive of my interpretation. If you want to understand why 500-year-old paper is often in better shape than paper from a few decades ago, don't ask a novelist. But if you're hoping for someone to articulate unspeakable things about friendship, creation, and the passage of time, you might do well to ask Hannah Regel. The author tells us what the archives cannot. They reanimate the life that is recorded on dead paper. -- Kassia Oset * The Rumpus * Wrought with tenderness and a buoyant light touch ... Regel asserts herself as an arresting new voice -- Miriam Balanescu * Irish Times * [Regel] underscores how the image of the self now undergoes the same process as the author's actual art, rather than "just" investigating each sacrifice the artist makes. -- Susan Finlay * Spike Art Magazine * This is a novel happily stuffed with female ephemera: leaks of menstrual blood; eyeliner badly applied; applied; the tacky earrings of a cheating boyfriend's other lover, found under the bed ... beautiful and, in its own quiet quiet way, radical. -- Alex Peake-Tomkinson * Times Literary Supplement * Brilliant and compelling ... A future classic -- Steven Long * Crack Magazine * [Regel's] knowledge of the art world jumps off the page ... she shows that, for women, the descent into madness can be a step towards freedom. -- Chloe Stead * Frieze * An experimental novel which works around reconstructing gaps ... a fixation on archival ruptures which continue to haunt its reader. -- Anna de Vivo * The London Magazine * Regel complicates the familiar anguish of trying to be an artist, resisting the easy gloss of enduring affection and solidarity by imparting feelings of envy and frustration ... [She] navigates these relations with remarkable stylistic flair, with every paragraph shifting swiftly from one viewpoint to another, dislocating time frames and often playfully pivoting meaning around a recurring word. -- Juliette Desorgues * Art Monthly * Quietly assured tale of ceramicists and disappointment -- Helen Charman * ArtReview, Best Books of 2024 * Incredible, and frustrating in all the right ways -- Freddie Powell * Something Curated * [The Last Sane Woman] boldly dispenses with traditional signposting as it switches viewpoint and voice. Regel sketches her mercurial protagonist with uncommon compassion - nothing else I read this year moved me quite so deeply. -- Gary Kaill * London Magazine, <i>Books of 2024</i> *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 196 mm
Width: 128 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
202 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-80429-537-3 (9781804295373)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Hannah Regel is a writer based in London. She has two published collections of poetry, WHEN I WAS ALIVE and OLIVER REED (Montez Press, 2017 and 2020). OLIVER REED was listed as one of The White Review's books of the year, 2020 and excerpted in Granta magazine. THE LAST SANE WOMAN is her debut novel, the manuscript was a recipient of the K Blundell Trust award.
Content
"Disquieting and gorgeous, The Last Sane Woman plucks images from the world with the claustrophobic pleasure of picking a scab. It reaches deep into the negative spaces of failure and precarity, and from these resources assembles something caustic, elegant, elusive and foreboding. It's also funny, with an offbeat, sly lightness that comes from knowing exactly how high the odds are stacked against you. I was hooked by the conversation between Regel's protagonists, looping across generations to give voice to the pains of making and the shameful pleasures of destruction."
-Daisy LaFarge, author of Life without Air and Paul
"The Last Sane Woman is a brilliant, slyly funny, and acutely observed meditation on the process both of the making of objects and of one's own life. Regel's prose is gorgeous and deftly rendered on every page."
-Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure
"In Regel's alluring debut novel a London art school graduate takes a job at a feminist archive and stumbles on a mystery buried in the collection ... a distinctive story of female friendship."
-Publishers Weekly
"Regel started out as a poet before turning to fiction, and the sharp aesthetic sense and ability to hold and distil a moment ... are present here, too."
-Holly Connolly, AnOther Magazine
-Daisy LaFarge, author of Life without Air and Paul
"The Last Sane Woman is a brilliant, slyly funny, and acutely observed meditation on the process both of the making of objects and of one's own life. Regel's prose is gorgeous and deftly rendered on every page."
-Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure
"In Regel's alluring debut novel a London art school graduate takes a job at a feminist archive and stumbles on a mystery buried in the collection ... a distinctive story of female friendship."
-Publishers Weekly
"Regel started out as a poet before turning to fiction, and the sharp aesthetic sense and ability to hold and distil a moment ... are present here, too."
-Holly Connolly, AnOther Magazine