Safe Spaces

Tice Cin is an interdisciplinary artist from North London. Her debut novel Keeping the House (2021) was named one of Guardian's Best Books of the Year. It won a Society of Authors Somerset Maugham Prize, a London Writers' Award and was shortlisted for Book of the Year at the British Book Awards, the Desmond Elliot Prize and the Jhalak Prize. Her films have been screened by Girls in Film and Worms Magazine and her music and poetry has been commissioned for Cartier, Montblanc and Mixcloud. Her BBC Radio 4 documentary How Much Can You Say? (2024) won an Audio Production Award.

Safe Spaces makes a universe of London in all its glory, cruelty, poetry and bureaucracy. This is a book that evokes the shattering effect of trauma on prose, then painstakingly reconstructs a way to experience life, and talk about love. I saw in it a feat of outstanding energy to keep looking, keep listening and, feel everything in a time of grief, and yet somehow overstate nothing.