"Everything becomes familiar eventually. But there was something else, I'd tried to explain, a rhythmic presence like breath, barely a sound, more like pressure. I feel it on my stomach in bed, a weight. The hairs on my neck stand on end. She still doesn't believe me..." Tower Street, East London, 1975: a crumbling block of artists' studios shaped by the myth of male genius but maintained by Connie, a female caretaker struggling to find her creative voice. Cut to 2017, and this same building is now luxury apartments, the new home of young couple Jane and Tam. Yet their fresh start is jeopardized when a chance discovery brings past secrets to light. Drawing on interviews with artists, photographers and administrators, as well as autobiographical elements, Innominate is a mystery story about privilege and power, in which buildings (and bodies) alternately nurture, trap, and entangle their inhabitants. Perhaps it is only by dissecting the architecture of a place that we can truly understand what happened there?
"Naomi Pearce pinches, peers and pulls at the ragged edges of gentrified corpora. Through a hybrid form of feminist forensic and experimental mystery writing, she guides us to a world behind, a world that has been forgotten." Maria Fusco ----------"A classic of local archaeology, lifting the particulars of place and persons into the dimension of a driven and crafted poetic. A building that is both grounded and fictive releases its psychobiography." Iain Sinclair ---------- "Innominate is both a novel and a collaborative act of memory, desire and political hope: ghost architecture, re-fleshed." Bhanu Kapil ---------- "Such a smart, self-assured debut ... A beautiful take on London's underground art scene of the 1970s, and how it haunts the gentrifiers of the 21st century. Naomi Pearce is a writer to watch." Juliet Jacques -----------"A complex hybreed - and that way lies the future. It's surprising and mysterious but not in a mystery story way." Jonathan Meades ---------- "Naomi Pearce deftly conjures the contrasting worlds of present day and 70s London and wraps them around a poignant mystery." Nicola White ---------- "Innominate is a meticulously researched novel, borne out by Pearce's attention to historical detail and her ability to render acutely vivid characters. However, it is the sense of place, and the sensation of deep time, which elevates this novel into something eerie." Claire Carroll, Lunate Journal ----------- "An arts administration murder mystery? I mean... amazing!" Stephan Tabbin, Frieze ------------ "Pearce deftly controls an atmosphere of something 'not quite tight' .... to produce a paranoid reader who seeks a missing key and who grasps for ominous portents to the plot." Jonathan P. Watts, Art Monthly
ISBN: 9781913430146
Dimensions: 190mm x 120mm x 14mm
Weight: unknown
164 pages