Suckerfish

Complicated, brilliant and achingly real . . . Suckerfish will quietly rip at your heart and then gently stitch it back up again.

In Suckerfish, every tender detail of a love between a child and parent comes alive. Ashani Lewis explores the knottiness of care and ambition with great empathy.

I savoured the prose. At once foreboding and meditative, each segment of Suckerfish is a window into a fully realised world: a Russian doll of narrative. The archetypal working, absent, vindictive mother that society is so scared of is fully realised here in complex glory. Lewis deftly manoeuvres between the horror and beauty of loving the mother terrifying, the mother critical, the mother magnificent: the one who hurts and loves you, and yet loves to hurt you.

Brilliantly unsettling . . . The more bound up in the toxic mother-daughter dynamic we become, what was a merely uncomfortable read becomes downright disturbing.

Lewis's writing is likably feisty and alive, full of verve and pizzazz, packed with crunchy observation and a wry kind of energy . . . This is a cry of pure rage, of fury and powerlessness.