Goodlord by Ella Frears review – this email to a landlord is dark and dazzling

The poet’s stream-of-consciousness complaint to an estate agent is a witty and compelling reflection on the state of the housing market and young womanhood

When I tell you that poet Ella Frears’s new “novelistic text” takes the form of one long email to a landlord, you might balk. You shouldn’t: Goodlord is a dazzling treat of a book, genuinely inventive, spiky and funny. Despite not having much of a plot – a young woman complains to her estate agent about the degradations of the housing market and what it means to be a young woman – Goodlord zips along, blackly compelling and readable.

The email thing is almost a gimmick, the tiny subtitle on the chic cover a hook with which to catch the curious bookshop-browser. The stream-of-consciousness text is laid out more like a long poem than anything more epistolatory (Frears’s 2020 poetry collection Shine, Darling was shortlisted for the Forward and TS Eliot prizes).

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