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This powerful, tender debut novel tells the story of the complicated fallout when a girl is plucked from her foster home into a dazzling new life in London as a model. A biting look at the realities of the comforting Cinderella stories we tell ourselves, Fit follows its characters, young and old, as they attempt to follow the harsh rules of a stratified world. The book is set in contemporary Britain where children starve and the gulf between rich and poor is vast. Moving, tragic, but ultimately hopeful, Fit takes an unflinching look at life in foster care and the ways in which poverty and neglect can echo throughout a life. The novel is written by a highschool teacher and advocate with firsthand experience with these issues.
Fit was the unanimously chosen winner of the 2020 Northern Book Prize.
“Tender, tough, plainspoken and powerful, Sammy Wright’s Fit is a nimble debut from a strong and wise new voice in British fiction. We were impressed by the vivid physicality of its setting and characters, by its simple yet arresting dialogue, by its dry and under- stated wit, and perhaps most by the sheer memorability of the thing: its portrait of teenage life and foster care in a marginalised Northern town remained with all of us long after we’d read it.” —Jury for the 2020 Northern Book Prize
“A brilliant song to young people raging against their lot – tender yet unsentimental, and a joy to read.” —Maxine Peake
“In precise, rhythmic prose, Sammy Wright captures the fear, electricity and longing of youth. Thick with darkness, violence and joy, Fit explores class privilege through an interrogation of the social constructs that shape our world, illuminating the beauty, fragility and loss of our lives within them.” —Jessica Andrews
“This story haunted me. Wright's young characters are complex and vividly alive - they're ingenious, irreverent, intoxicated, traumatised, grieving, violent, vulnerable. Fit presents a picture of contemporary life in the north of England that is by turns tender and deeply unsettling.” —Naomi Booth
“The ‘rags to riches’ story given a modern, original and thoroughly satisfying twist; Fit foregrounds lives we rarely get to read about in fiction, and is compelling for the interesting things it has to say about the cost of dreams: who gets to have them, who mediates them, who stands to gain from them, and what happens to those left behind. A work of compassion and insight, crisply written, with a cast of characters who live vividly on the page.” —Stephen Kelman
“Fit is quietly, modestly one of the best books about being young, beautiful, and damaged that you’re ever going to read. Sentence by sentence, it has a gaunt grace; cumulatively, it has the force of a dark, dark fairytale. Sammy Wright’s debut is a tightly-plotted minimal masterpiece.” —Toby Litt
“A heartbreaking fairytale, set mainly in an unnamed northern town, Fit is a brilliant novel with a huge amount to say about class, poverty and approaching adulthood.” —David Coates, Blackwells Manchester
Sammy Wright is a high school teacher and administrator. He was brought up in Scotland, worked in London for twelve years, and now lives in north England. He has served on the Social Mobility Commission and is currently vice principal at the Southmoor Academy, a public school near Newcastle. His short stories have been published in a variety of anthologies and his novel Fit, which won the 2020 Northern Book Prize, is his first book-length publication.