Bolt from the Blue

Jeremy Cooper

From Shelf: My Most Selfish Reads 2021

A novel in epistolary form, Bolt from the Blue charts the relationship between a mother and her artistic daughter over the course of thirty-odd years, and offers a partial and subjective account of British contemporary art since the mid-1980s.

In Bolt from the Blue, Jeremy Cooper, the winner of the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize, charts the relationship between a mother and daughter over the course of thirty-odd years. In October 1985, Lynn moves down to London to enrol at Saint Martin's School of Art, leaving her mother behind in a suburb of Birmingham. Their relationship is complicated, and their primary form of contact is through the letters, postcards and emails they send each other periodically, while Lynn slowly makes her mark on the London art scene. A novel in epistolary form, Bolt from the Blue captures the waxing and waning of the mother-daughter relationship over time, achieving a rare depth of feeling with a deceptively simple literary form.