‘A strikingly original work. Lai's crystalline prose and lightly-worn erudition are set in stark contrast to the themes of violence and ecological collapse underpinning the novel. The setting of Mornington Hall is brought vividly to life, evoking the strange labyrinths of Borges or Susanna Clarke's Piranesi. A novel that will enrich and unsettle you in equal measure.’
– Kathryn Bromwich, author of At the Edge of the Woods

‘Landscapes is a beautiful and measured piece of ecological hauntology. Mixing precise, crystalline prose with an eerie sense of environmental foreboding, Lai effectively explores a dusty yet timely collection of historic, artistic and human paraphernalia.’
– Adam Scovell, author of Local Haunts

Set in a near-future fraught with ecological collapse, Christine Lai’s mesmerising and prismatic debut novel Landscapes is a brilliant exploration of memory, empathy, preservation, and art as an instrument for recollection and renewal.

In the English countryside—decimated by heat and drought—Penelope archives what remains of an estate’s once notable collection. As she catalogues the library’s contents, she keeps a diary of her final months in the dilapidated country house that has been her home for two decades and a refuge for those who have been displaced by disasters. Out of necessity, Penelope and her partner, Aidan, have sold the house and its scheduled demo­lition marks the pressing deadline for completing the archive. But with it also comes the impending return of Aidan’s brother, Julian, at whose hands Penelope suffered during a brief but violent relationship twenty-two years before. As Julian’s visit looms, Penelope finds herself unable to suppress the past, clinging to art as a means of understanding, of survival, and of reckoning.

Recalling the works of Rachel Cusk and Kazuo Ishiguro, Landscapes is an elegiac and spellbinding blend of narrative, essay, and diary that reinvents the country-house novel for our age of catastrophe, announcing the arrival of an extraordi­narily gifted new writer.