The Nudist Colony
Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and winner of the Amazon Bursary
Follow 14-year-old Aesop as he enters a world where the law is broken on a far grander scale than anything he's used to...
A fierce and exotic fable of shifting identity and viral invasion, subtly plotted, unnervingly precise in the weight and balance of language. A prodigious debut.
Iain Sinclair
An extraordinary first novel…boundlessly ambitious…This is writing at the level of myth: fully formed, recognisable, unique. The dis-location felt upon reading The Nudist Colony is the shock of the new...
Guardian
Read the full review here
The novel's settings are vividly conveyed ... a series of haunting images that reveal England to be a country rotting in its own past ... an impressive debut.
Times
This first novel is impressively serious. As well as having an original and powerful imagination, May can write deftly ... Some episodes are self-contained tours de force.
Times Literary Supplement
More sympathetic than Amis's London Fields, as real as The Royle Family, The Nudist Colony shows major talent.
Big Issue
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Spanish City
Shortlisted for the RSL Encore Award
A teacher takes his teenage kidnappers to meet a ghost in this tale of wartime dreams and peacetime disappointments, of love, betrayal, death and resurrections.
Spanish City should be read by whoever it was who said that a good novel could not be written by a writer under the age of 30.
Boyd Tonkin, Independent on Sunday
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The Internationals
Longlisted for the Women’s Prize
Set in a Macedonian refugee camp during the 1999 Kosovo crisis, The Internationals spans seventy-eight tense days from the commencement of NATO airstrikes on Yugoslavia to the withdrawal of Serb forces from Northern Kosovo.
The Internationals is a compelling work of fiction and armed with an intelligence that sets its own distractions against the diet of 'abridged reality' on which our taste for euphemistic spin, in a language or time of war or conflict, continues worryingly to depend.
The Spectator
Rare perception and finesse…Finding a tone that lets cynicism co-exist with compassion is no mean peace-keeping feat. The Internationals achieves it with admirable poise.
Independent
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The Queen of Suburbia
Ever wondered what your neighbours really get up to behind closed doors?
Like Mike Leigh directing Desperate Housewives, a brilliantly 1980s suburban drama.
Elle
The narrative is beautifully observed, with the subtle touch of a writer who makes every action and mannerism feel plausible. Sarah May has a rare talent for melding the farcical with the tragic and has produced a novel which is a scathingly successful piece of social commentary.
Daily Mail
Sarah May has brought the obsessions, ambitions, and class
paranoia of Thatcher's Britain beautifully back to life. It's a visceral read, but this is one book you'll be happy to read in a rush.
Daily Express
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Other books
Sarah May’s The Butterfly Club is one of the Six Plays for Young Performers. The book showcases some of the best plays for young people aged 13 – 25 and is regarded as essential for teachers and students of Drama and for youth drama groups.
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