This illuminating, expansive and intricately connected book on embroidery made me giddy with the ideas and knowledge it reveals. In detailing so diligently the histories, practices and techniques of needlework, insights into craft as a whole open up. Fancy Work shows how fluency in non-linguistic forms enriches language, sharpens political thought and articulates some of the most radical ways of living.
Holly Pester, author of The Lodgers There are so many layers to this book; every page left my mind brimming with detail, colour and affection. Fancy Work somehow contains multitudes while remaining clear, intimate and curiously joyful. I knew at once it was a book I would treasure and return to.
Sara Baume, author of Seven Steeples I loved this book. Alice Hattrick writes with luminous beauty about textile craft as a mode of resistance, and about the radically creative lives of artist May Morris and her partner MF. Fancy Work presents a fascinating history of stitchwork as an embodied practice, from Gees Bend quilts stained with menstrual blood to the meticulous embroidery of nineteenth-century lunatic patients. This is a book about patience, repetition and generative unproductivity about the human desire to make things and the loss inherent in all textiles. It is curious, smart, fierce and tender; I will be thinking about it for a long time.
Maddie Ballard, author of Bound The quaint stereotypes that surround embroidery cannot survive after this. Alice Hattricks intervention is not just a history of maligned craft, but a study into the imperialistic and misogynistic forces that have caused and perpetuated that derision. Fabric, it turns out, is infused with life. It is an overlooked witness to and participant in our collective story. You will be hooked.
Nathalie Olah, author of Bad Taste Ill Feelings is a deeply personal and deeply political reckoning with the nature of illness, inheritance, time, silence, bodies and invisibility. Alice Hattrick offers both a radical redefinition of the dominant narratives surrounding health and pain, and the knowledge we need in order to name, understand and resist them. Hattrick has found a voice and form which open up new and exciting possibilities for writing the self and making sense of the collective past: I read this remarkable book with outrage, fascination and immense admiration.
Francesca Wade, author of Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife I love the quality of attentiveness that Alice Hattrick brings to their poised and pointillistic exploration of the mysterious aetiologies and affects of chronic fatigue. They excel in listening out for echoes and whispers, their narrative of illness wriggling into uncomfortable places that medicine dismisses or ignores. Their book makes you pause to think and rethink page by page.
Marina Benjamin, author of Insomnia Ill Feelings defies neat conclusions as well as easy categorization of the book itself, so that attempting to describe it here seems like misdiagnosis, and to try and name the paradox at its heart seems like a betrayal of its rewards. But the thrill of Alice Hattricks writing stems from its struggle to be free of its constraints, communicating with unspooling fury the mutability of lived experience rather than presuming to define it. In doing so, they remind us that the undefined our own ill feelings reveals not weakness so much as our inherent capacity for resistance.
Olivia Sudjic, author of Exposure I read Ill Feelings with a sense of wonder at the courage required not just to live with a medically unexplained illness, but to write about it with such descriptive clarity and probing intelligence. Alice Hattricks book is a powerful cure for ignorance or indifference about a complex form of suffering.
Edmund Gordon, author of The Invention of Angela Carter Ill Feelings is a necessary, urgent book that I feel I have been waiting my whole life to read. A beautiful combination of memoir, reportage and razor-sharp analysis, it made me think very deeply and critically and feel powerfully understood all at once a testament to what truly accomplished non-fiction writers can achieve. This book makes me excited for the future of literary non-fiction writing and its power to change the world and how we see it.
Lucia Osborne-Crowley, author of The Lasting Harm Hattricks ability to reflect life with ME in form and language is complex and brilliant. The structure of Ill Feelings appears initially as haphazard, perhaps, but the more you read, the more it clarifies: this is not a book of simple narrative, of gradual progression.
Connor Harrison, Review 31 (praise for Ill Feelings) Ill Feelings belongs on the shelf with Susan Sontags Illness as Metaphor, Ben Watts Patient, Anne Boyers The Undying and Jenn Ashworths Notes Made While Falling, because, quite simply, its that good.
Steven Long, The Crack Magazine Ill Feelings offers spellbinding reality unlike anything I have ever read. It conquers the sense of grief that we have to learn to live with; this deep guttural fear in humanity is addressed compassionately.
Billie Ingram-Sofokleous, Buzz Magazine
