Fit
by Sammy Wright
And Other Stories 2022
256 pages
14×21 cm
Charting the impact on a small community of a girl being plucked by happenstance from her foster home and dropped into a dazzling new life as a London model, Fit is a moving, tragic, but ultimately hopeful look at the ways in which poverty and neglect can echo through a life… even after you think you’ve gotten your fairy-tale ending.
This is the first novel by Sammy Wright, a secondary-school teacher with first-hand experience of a contemporary Britain in which children starve and the gulf between rich and poor is vast and growing.
In a town on the edge of the moors in the North of England, a group of young people are growing up. A simple setting for a page turner book with deep insights on contemporary world and growing adolescents’ everyday life and struggles.
There are scenes that make you gasp, sentences that sting and a rare realism behind it for anyone who can understand what it is like to live with, work with and teach to children who are not just economically, but also socially and spiritually deprived.
The main characters feel so real it’s hard not to compare them to friends we had growing up through teenage years, and the side ones are often just as compelling. You will follow Wright’s young characters and witness the fallout from the opportunities they are given and miss out on.
An elegant, keenly observed tale of unequal changes and fragile egos, gaze and perceptions of beauty.
Here you can download an English BOOK PROFILE
Press:
«This story haunted me. Wright’s young characters are complex and vividly alive – they’re ingenious, irreverent, intoxicated, traumatized, grieving, violent, vulnerable. Fit presents a picture of contemporary life that is by turns tender and deeply unsettling.»
Naomi Booth
«Compelling for the interesting things it has to say about the cost of dreams: who gets to have them, who mediates them, who stands to gain from them, and what happens to those left behind. A work of compassion and insight, crisply written, with a cast of characters who live vividly on the page.»
Stephen Kelman
«Fit is quietly, modestly one of the best books about being young, beautiful, and damaged that you’re ever going to read. Sentence by sentence, it has a gaunt grace; cumulatively, it has the force of a dark, dark fairytale. Sammy Wright’s debut is a tightly-plotted minimal masterpiece.»
Toby Litt
«Tender, tough, plainspoken and powerful, Sammy Wright’s Fit is a nimble debut from a strong and wise new voice in British fiction. We were impressed by the vivid physicality of its setting and characters, by its simple yet arresting dialogue, by its dry and understated wit, and perhaps most by the sheer memorability of the thing: its portrait of teenage life and foster care in a marginalized Northern town remained with all of us long after we’d read it.»
Jury of the 2020 Northern Book Prize
Winner of the Northern Book Prize 2020
Rights available in a selection of countries
Represented in collaboration with And Other Stories
Sammy Wright was brought up in Edinburgh, worked in London for twelve years, and now lives in Newcastle and works as a vice principal of a large secondary school in Sunderland. His short stories have been published in a variety of anthologies and the novel Fit, his first book-length publication, won the 2020 Northern Book Prize.
