little scratch
UK: Faber & Faber, January 2021
US & Canada: Doubleday and Strange Light
Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2021
Shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2021
An Observer 10 Best Debut Novelists of 2021
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
“This extraordinary début novel records a young woman’s thoughts as she moves through a single day . . . Watson conveys the shapes and the rhythms of thought, and coheres scraps of consciousness into clear moments of impression, observation, and anxiety.”
— The New Yorker
“Every moment feels filled with life and with jeopardy . . . little scratch is an extremely perceptive depiction of power and agency.”
— The Guardian
“A coherent, gripping account of how it feels to be alive.”
— New Statesman
“Alive to joy as well as pain, this is an intelligent, invigorating marvel, not to be missed.”
— Daily Mail
“With clear-eyed precision and pathos, little scratch recalls the darkest elements of the MeToo conversation . . . At just over 200 pages, it’s a bullet of a novel, ricocheting between grief, anger and hope.”
— The Observer
“Timely, and totally absorbing.”
— The Sunday Telegraph
“little scratch absorbs the more fragmented forms of attention and makes of them something rich, assured and sad.”
— The New York Times
A best new book of 2021 in the Evening Standard
An unmissable book of 2021 in Stylist Magazine
A most anticipated book of 2021 in the New Statesman
Novel of the week in
The Week
“Startlingly original.”
— Vogue
“Watson’s profound debut is written in compelling stream of consciousness.”
— ELLE UK
“[An] astonishing debut. . . many books dealing with a subject as serious as Watson’s hold their readers firmly within an atmosphere of pain, but here, the instances of playful rage, frustration and knowing cynicism neatly reveal that horror and humour need not be mutually exclusive.”
— Financial Times
“An incredible debut . . . It’ll be on every prize list so be the first to read it.”
— Stylist Magazine
“little scratch is a thought-provoking and original debut from a writer not afraid to push boundaries . . . the desperate normality of [sexual violence] is the alarming legacy of this clever, compelling book.”
— The Irish Times
“Funny and relatable . . . [little scratch] takes a regular day and renders it irregularly, interestingly. It presents grief, violence, self-harm and self-doubt in an unusual fashion, driving home just how disorienting and destabilizing these forces can be. It is of the MeToo era . . . but exists on a plane all its own.”
— The Washington Post
“little scratch drops us without ceremony into the frenetic, unsettled narration of an unnamed, assault-scarred office worker. The rhythm (agitated) and spacing (spotted) reveal a mind attempting to absorb, minute by minute, a torrent of mundanity mixed with terror. Watson has rendered in type a disturbed and attenuated mode of thought that is all too familiar to most of us today.”
— BuzzFeed’s 38 Great Books To Read This Fall, Recommended By Our Favorite Indie Booksellers
“A powerful debut . . . one of the year's best new writers to watch.”
— Bustle
“Watson lets the words flow, jumbled and urgent as our thoughts are, like Kerouac and his scrolls . . . it charms. The book’s unconventional strategy fell away as I read; I cared about the narrator as one does a well-drawn character.”
— Rumaan Alam, The New Republic
“One of the most captivating books of the year . . . The narrator is simple, ordinary, which is what makes her thoughts feel so unbearably intimate. She's an everywoman --she is us, the many who have suffered at the hands of those with power. Watson steers her protagonist with skill, leaving readers mournful and aching by the time she falls asleep.”
— Shelf Awareness
“An inventive, immersive debut . . . Watson’s haunting, virtuosic performance is well worth a look.”
— Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Formally daring and unique, the novel’s structure mirrors the ways the woman’s mind jumps from mundane moments to the life-changing ones.”
— The Millions
“A daring book whose innovations are balanced by the sad familiarity of its pain.”
— Kirkus Review
“little scratch is a novel of such startling pulse, a pulse that ceaselessly, daringly beats its way through writing . . . I couldn't put it down, as they say, but really, I couldn't. Reading it has broken my heart and opened my mind. It is a daring display of experience that persists and persists and never loses its light.”
— Jenny Slate, New York Times bestselling author of Little Weirds
“Rebecca Watson's little scratch is an immersive experience, an exhilarating plunge into the mundanity and the horror and the mundane horror of a day in a life that is not quite right. It's experimental in the best sense of the word: Watson bends form to accommodate a narrator who wants desperately to communicate but cannot quite bring herself to speak.”
— Miranda Popkey, author of Topics of Conversation
“Rebecca Watson's little scratch reads like the cinders settling in the air after an explosion. The silent and enraged inner testimony of a character striving to maintain "normalcy", little scratch is daring and completely readable.”
— Colin Barrett, author of Young Skins
“Wry, funny and heartbreaking. little scratch captures beautifully a rhythm not just of trauma, but also of the small, defiant, everyday happinesses that push through and against it.”
— Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure and Blue Ticket
“little scratch voraciously captures our life: the multiplicity of ourselves, our narratives, our anxieties, our truths, and most of all, our sexuality. Watson uses language with a sniper's precision to target and capture the million little re-calibrations of the self that a young woman has to undertake in order to go from one day to the next . . . It is a story that is urgent. It is a story that needs to be told.”
— Meena Kandasamy, author of When I Hit You and Exquisite Cadavers
“little scratch is playful, precise and insightful. Rebecca Watson's writing bursts with enormous energy.”
— Nicole Flattery, author of Show Them a Good Time
“Witty, defiant, tender.”
— Olivia Sudjic, author of Sympathy and Exposure
“I love little scratch for being a bravely deployed thread of language behaving more like thought than story. An animated and perceptive novel.”
— Holly Pester, author of Comic Timing
“Confident and vital. Through both the patterns and particularities of how this novel navigates trauma, little scratch skates between big ideas and sensory prompts. This is a novel that offers a challenge to the idea of the natural reader-a question not posed in the abstract but as one you need to grapple with as a cost of admission to the text. little scratch is an absolute gift.”
— Naoise Dolan, author of Exciting Times
“little scratch is a little miracle . . . impossible to read it and not wish there were more books like it.”
— Alan Trotter, author of Muscle
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