Fit
Winner of the 2020 Northern Book Prize
This is the first novel by Sammy Wright, a secondary-school teacher with first-hand experience of a contemporary Britain in which children starve and the gulf between rich and poor is vast and growing.
Charting the impact on a small community of a girl being plucked by happenstance from her foster home and dropped into a dazzling new life as a London model, Fit is a moving, tragic, but ultimately hopeful look at the ways in which poverty and neglect can echo through a life . . . even after you think you’ve gotten your fairy-tale ending.
Fit was the winner, by unanimous decision, of the 2020 Northern Book Prize.
Read an ExcerptMore Info
Fit was the winner of the 2020 Northern Book Prize, awarded for the best unpublished manuscript from the North of England by a jury including the writers Sunjeev Sahota and Daniel Trilling.
Sammy Wright will be reading from Fit at And Other Stories’ tenth anniversary party in Sheffield on 20th October 2021. More information about the event can be found here.
Reviews
Maxine Peake
‘A brilliant song to young people raging against their lot - tender yet unsentimental, and a joy to read.’
Jessica Andrews
‘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.’
Naomi Booth
‘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.’
Stephen Kelman
‘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.’
Toby Litt
‘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.’
Booksellers
Booksellers on Fit: ‘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
Jury for the 2020 Northern Book Prize (Amy Arnold, Sunjeev Sahota, Daniel Trilling, Tara Tobler)
‘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.’
