Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2019

Brothers Jackson and Frank live on the margins of a big urban sprawl. From abandoned tower blocks to gleaming skyscrapers, their city is brutal, beautiful and divided. As anti-government protests erupt across the teeming metropolis, the brothers sail in search of the Red Citadel and its promise of a radical new way of life. A striking portrait of the precarity of modern urban living, and of the fierce bonds that grow between brothers, Patrick Langley’s debut Arkady is a brilliant coming-of-age novel, as brimming with vitality as the city itself.

‘A distinctly post-Brexit novel, Arkady is set in an unnamed city that both is and isn’t London, thick with the atmosphere of the riots of 2011, and the stricken, devastated aura of the days after the Grenfell fire. It is oblique, and bleak: it is never quite clear what has happened or is happening, what is it about our world that has finally broken or overflowed.... But there is always a flutter of hope in the dark, and in Arkady it dwells in the unshakeable brotherly love between the novel’s two heroes, Jackson and Frank [whose] relationship is so beautifully etched ... Arkady suggests that we’ll build our own arcadias out of the dreams that haunt us, both threatening and protective.’ — Lauren Elkin, The Guardian

Fitzcarraldo, 2019, 200pages.