We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff by Isabel Waidner

Paperback. Peninsula Press. 2022. New Condition

Polar bears emerge from t-shirts. Reeboks come to life. Nothing is normal, in the house of Mother Normal.

In their second novel, Isabel Waidner blends critical writing and fiction with anarchic joy. We follow Shae, a character who looks like Eleven from Stranger Things, but is 36 years old, and who works for minimum wage in a run-down hotel on the Isle of Wight.

This is fiction that extends the avant-garde tradition beyond the upper-class experience that it usually chronicles - making it over as an ally of working-class queer experience. Set against a backdrop of austerity and decline, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff is an irreverent, boundary-erasing piece of work, celebrating the radical potential of resistance, ingenuity, and friendship.