I did not actually read Bluets, I think - I just let it hit me. Her words come, as though from a great distance, and strike incredibly close. I remember where I was when I read each of Maggie Nelson's books in the same way I remember a place where I heard important news. She's so much better than anything I've read for a long, long time.

Visceral, learned, and acutely lucid, Bluets is a slim feat of literary innovation and grace, never before published in the UK. Much like Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse, Bluets has passed between lovers in the ecstasy of new love, and been pressed into the hands of the heartbroken. The combination produces a raw, cerebral work devoted to the inextricability of pleasure and pain, and to the question of what role, if any, aesthetic beauty can play in times of great heartache or grief. While its narrator sets out to construct a sort of 'pillow book' about her lifelong obsession with the colour blue, she ends up facing down both the painful end of an affair and the grievous injury of a dear friend. Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation - Olivia Laingīluets winds its way through depression, divinity, alcohol, and desire, visiting along the way with famous blue figures, including Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Yves Klein, Leonard Cohen and Andy Warhol.

Bluets maggie