The Recovery House

I was deeply moved by The Recovery House, how its portrayal of crisis and meaning, faith and human connection is rendered with such precision and immediacy; each vignette feels like a small gift, told in a voice that will linger with me – Sophie MackintoshThere are writers who both survive things and understand them. Brutal, precise, and somehow full of light. – Yrsa Daley-WardTruly, I think the business of blurbing isn’t fit to do this book justice…The Recovery House is a work of the soul. It’s some of the most earnest, beautiful writing I’ve come across in years - I feel lucky to have read it, and deeply inspired. – Jo HamyaDerek Owusu is the real deal, and The Recovery House is his best work yet; a brutal, painful, vulnerable book rendered with rare poise and style – Kieran GoddardI’ll hold up my hands and say it, I thought Owusu had written his masterwork already, I even wrote as much, but in this latest novel he homes in on everything that makes his writing so rich, emotional and wise, distilling it all into a finely textured work of tenderness, love, camaraderie and human resilience. We’re held securely in his palm for the duration of these scant pages. This is tender restraint charged with love and compassion. This is our uncharted humanity turned to face the world. This is truly us. – Courttia NewlandI would like to call The Recovery House a masterclass in storytelling, voice and what a novel should be, but this kind of talent can’t be taught. I was mesmerised from start to finish… I’ve never read anything like it and I don’t think I ever will. The Recovery House is perfect - it doesn’t beg you to feel anything but you feel it all regardless. The characters are real living people to whom you find yourself attached, The Recovery House itself is all around, the doors and chairs and tables all physical things you can reach out and touch - all possible because Derek Owusu has created a story that is impossible to read without living within it, impossible to put down without reaching out for it again and impossible to forget without realising that it’s like nothing else you’ll ever read, because it’s the best thing you’ve ever read – Ore Agbaje-WilliamsThe Recovery House starts as an arresting, nuanced portrait of an artist in crisis, and ends as a finely wrought exploration of how we create meaning in the darkest periods of our lives. I loved it – Krystelle BamfordIn THE RECOVERY HOUSE, Derek Owusu writes movingly about attention as a form of devotion, about bearing witness as a mode of care. I loved this beautiful book that explores the ways reading and writing make and unmake us – Sarah BernsteinThe Recovery House is something real, a delicate slice of life that is gracious enough to let us into the private world of a mental health facility and meet the folks who reside there. Written with an agile rhythm and refreshing honesty, it holds its characters with tender care and trusts us to hold them too. An impressively vulnerable novel - I read it in one sitting and immediately went back to page one to read it again – VaraidzoA prescient novel, which captures very powerfully the surreal space and mundane routines of an institution. Owusu has drawn that desolate situation so poignantly, the peace and protection of the institution weighted against the mundanity and suffocation, and then made these illuminating connections throughout with the seclusion of religious life, the comfort of religious rituals. * Sara Baume *

Derek Owusu is a writer, poet, and podcaster from north London. He discovered his passion for literature at the age of twenty-three while studying exercise science at university. Unable to afford a change of degree, Derek began reading voraciously and sneaking into English Literature lectures at the University of Manchester. Derek edited and contributed to Safe: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space. That Reminds Me, his first solo work, won the Desmond Elliott Prize 2020.

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