SHORTLISTED FOR THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD 2024
LONGLISTED FOR THE NOTA BENE PRIZE 2024
A radical, joyful novel from Goldsmiths Prize-winning author Isabel Waidner
In flight from a traumatic rural childhood, Corey Fah has come to earth in a one-bed council flat in the capital. Trapped, with partner Drew, in the limited world which late capitalism has allotted them, they are modestly happy but practically futureless.
Until, one day, Corey is offered a life-changing prize from out of the blue. Things are looking up - but as Corey soon finds, it's one thing winning a prize in life's lottery, and quite another being able to collect it - especially if you are a queer, working class immigrant with all of History working against you.
Corey Fah's pursuit of the elusive prize - and an escape from precarity - is a whirlwind, epic journey through the streets of the city and the time-loops of the past, written with boundless energy and invention.
Social mobility, in this radiant, radical novel, is never a simple step up the ladder, but a hopeful leap into the void.
Praise for Corey Fah Does Social Mobility:
'A head-spinning, mind-bending roller coaster of fun, horror, and subversion' Kamila Shamsie
'A radical, rebellious novel . . . [Waidner] brings a fresh lens to our troubled world' Observer
[The] writer everyone is talking about . . . and deservedly so' Bernardine Evaristo
'Filled with wickedly sharp commentary and well-aimed digs at hypocrisy and injustice' Times Literary Supplement

Isabel Waidner is a writer based in London. They are the author of Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, Sterling Karat Gold, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff and Gaudy Bauble. They are the winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2021 and were shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2019, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in 2022 and the Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2018, 2020 and 2022. They are a co-founder of the event series Queers Read This at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and they are an academic in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London.