Author(s): Kate Briggs

Novel | Fitzcarraldo Editions | Goldsmiths Prize short list 2023

Windham Campbell Prize-winner Kate Briggs' long-awaited debut novel, imagining new forms of life, writing and experience.

It’s early morning and there’s a whole new day ahead. How will it unfold? The baby will feed, hopefully she’ll sleep; Helen looks out of the window. The Long Form is the story of two people composing a day together. It is a day of movements and improvisations, common and uncommon rhythms, stopping and starting again. As the morning progresses, a book – The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding – gets delivered, and the scope of the day widens further. Matters of care-work share ground with matters of friendship, housing, translation, aesthetics and creativity. Small incidents of the day revive some of the oldest preoccupations of the novel: the force of social circumstance, the power of names, the meaning of duration and the work of love. With lightness and precision, Kate Briggs renews Henry Fielding’s proposition for what a novel can be, combining fiction and essay to write an extraordinary domestic novel of far-reaching ideas.

‘'[S]ometimes she seems to achieve the impossible, weaving an invisible emotive thread between polemic and experience to powerful effect.... [M]akes for exhilarating reading. There is a sense of new ground being broken.'
— Jo Hamya, The Guardian

‘The Long Form is an absorbing and profound novel in which Kate Briggs breathes extraordinary life into the quiet moments of a young woman: one who is also a new mother, a reader, a daughter, a friend. With every carefully weighted sentence, action and thought, one is immersed in the radical generosity of this writing, its principles of collectivity and its feminist commitment to making the smallest, most everyday act worthy of consideration within a literary canon. A beautifully written book about the art of reading, of criticism, and of surviving through the strangest yet most normal of times.’
— Preti Taneja, author of Aftermath

‘Ostensibly about a single day in the lives of a new mother and her infant, The Long Form – with its recursive structure, its subtle connections and reverberations, its attentiveness to physical and social life, and its animated conversation with other works of fiction and theory – presents the novel form as the most elastic of containers. Kate Briggs is a brilliant writer and thinker.’
— Kathryn Scanlan, author of Kick the Latch

‘Kate Briggs treats the quotidian rhythms of Helen and Rose, mother and baby, with unusual attentiveness, perspicacity and, most importantly, largeness of thought. This makes The Long Form a radical, celebratory and quite magical consideration of the profound creative possibilities inherent in, and intrinsic to, everyday experience. It’s such a lively and generous book.’
—Wendy Erskine, author of Dance Move

‘The Long Form looks at this detail within the context of the structures that surround it, and in doing so Kate Briggs has built a novel that is simultaneously warm and exact, far-reaching and meticulous, generous and wise.’
—Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes

‘Briggs is a fantastic writer: that is clear by the end of this eminently strange novel…Briggs has written a work that will constantly reward a re-reading, with a voice that combines a deep complexity with moments of piercing clarity. It is an intelligent and well-read book: but it is also emphatically convincing and moving.’
— Patrick Maxwell, The Big Issue