'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 '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 '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 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 Square Haunting (praise for Ill Feelings) 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 (praise for Ill Feelings) 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)
