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The Last Sane Woman
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A beguiling debut novel about friendship and failure.
Nicola Long is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London. She begins to spend her hours at a small underfunded archive dedicated to women’s art. There she discovers one side of a correspondence beginning in 1976 and spanning a dozen years, written from one woman – a ceramics graduate, uncannily like Nicola – to a friend living a contrasting and conventionally moored life. As Nicola reads on, an acute sense of affinity turns into obsession.
She abandons one job after another to make time for the archive. The litany of coincidences in the letters becomes uncanny, and Nicola’s feeling of ownership begets a growing dread: should she be afraid of where these letters are leading?
Reviews
Disquieting and gorgeous, The Last Sane Woman plucks images from the world with the claustrophobic pleasure of picking a scab. It reaches deep into the negative spaces of failure and precarity, and from these resources assembles something caustic, elegant, elusive and foreboding. It’s also funny, with an offbeat, sly lightness that comes from knowing exactly how high the odds are stacked against you. I was hooked by the conversation between Regel’s protagonists, looping across generations to give voice to the pains of making and the shameful pleasures of destruction.
The Last Sane Woman is a brilliant, slyly funny, and acutely observed meditation on the process both of the making of objects and of one’s own life. Regel’s prose is gorgeous and deftly rendered on every page.
In Regel's alluring debut novel a London art school graduate takes a job at a feminist archive and stumbles on a mystery buried in the collection ... a distinctive story of female friendship.
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Regel started out as a poet before turning to fiction, and the sharp aesthetic sense and ability to hold and distil a moment ... are present here, too.
, AnOther Magazine -
Regel offers an unnerving and playfully pithy world, one in which dread is almost a fetish, tragedy an aesthetic, failure a form of entertainment.
, Telegraph -
Regel understands the fine line between success and failure, the difficulties of producing meaningful art in a fickle world, and her book is a sensitive meditation on creativity and disconnection.
, Observer -
The Last Sane Woman is an evocative, aching riff on the epistolary tradition
, The Washington Post -
In Regel’s case, her poetry as well as her fiction gives the sensation of the author winking at you from behind the page
, Interview Magazine -
Jaunty, warm and always sensitive...[Regel is] an author who can handle delicate subjects with assurance and charm.
, Literary Review -
Moving, lyrical
, Independent -
Regel possesses an impressive ability to make the familiar unfamiliar...Her sentences are lyrical and stunning-exactly what one hopes for from a poet-turned-novelist like herself, who was also co-editor of the feminist art journal SALT. The result is an exquisite, simultaneously comforting and uncanny representation of what it means to create, maintain community, and make a living amid our contemporary malaise, executed with the precision and delicacy of a potter at the wheel.
, Los Angeles Review of Books -
The dog-ears and underlines in this reader's copy function as a miniature archive of my interpretation. If you want to understand why 500-year-old paper is often in better shape than paper from a few decades ago, don't ask a novelist. But if you're hoping for someone to articulate unspeakable things about friendship, creation, and the passage of time, you might do well to ask Hannah Regel. The author tells us what the archives cannot. They reanimate the life that is recorded on dead paper.
, The Rumpus -
Wrought with tenderness and a buoyant light touch ... Regel asserts herself as an arresting new voice
, Irish Times -
[Regel] underscores how the image of the self now undergoes the same process as the author’s actual art, rather than “just” investigating each sacrifice the artist makes.
, Spike Art Magazine -
This is a novel happily stuffed with female ephemera: leaks of menstrual blood; eyeliner badly applied; applied; the tacky earrings of a cheating boyfriend’s other lover, found under the bed ... beautiful and, in its own quiet quiet way, radical.
, Times Literary Supplement -
Brilliant and compelling ... A future classic
, Crack Magazine -
[Regel's] knowledge of the art world jumps off the page ... she shows that, for women, the descent into madness can be a step towards freedom.
, Frieze -
An experimental novel which works around reconstructing gaps ... a fixation on archival ruptures which continue to haunt its reader.
, The London Magazine -
Regel complicates the familiar anguish of trying to be an artist, resisting the easy gloss of enduring affection and solidarity by imparting feelings of envy and frustration ... [She] navigates these relations with remarkable stylistic flair, with every paragraph shifting swiftly from one viewpoint to another, dislocating time frames and often playfully pivoting meaning around a recurring word.
, Art Monthly -
Quietly assured tale of ceramicists and disappointment
, ArtReview, Best Books of 2024 -
Incredible, and frustrating in all the right ways
, Something Curated