Spent Light

A woman contemplates the toaster she’s inherited from a recently deceased neighbor. A homely, useful sort of object, hardly worthy of a sonnet or still-life. And yet, thinking of where its parts originated, who assembled it, and how it arrived at her door, could it not be considered just as much a source of awe as any mountain range or waterfall? Numbed as we may be by our lives, can we still be shown fear in a handful of crumbs?

Thus begins this one-of-a-kind debut novel, a journey through the manufactured objects making up a comfortable, middle-class life, seeing in them all the “global networks of resource extraction and forced labour, technologies of industrial murder, histories of genocide, alongside traditions of craft, the pleasures of convenience and dexterity, the giving and receiving of affection and care.” (Jennifer Hodgson) 

An atomized Mrs. Dalloway, featuring a narrator imprisoned and finally freed by her unrelenting focus on the smallest accoutrements of modern living—part smelly, bodily struggle and part digital, frictionless ease—Spent Light, here accompanied by a new foreword by Teju Cole, stands as a masterly anatomy of our moment in time, politically, poetically, and personally.

“A shocking book. Lara Pawson’s merciless and exquisite prose adorns everyday objects with the violence of history—the savage comedy by which living creatures have become broken, petrified things. I will never look at a toaster or a timer, a toenail or a squirrel, the same way again.”

—Merve Emre

“Spent Light is, obviously, not comfortable reading, but it is wild, bold writing in league with perfectly clear thinking, and while disturbing it is also, in a satisfyingly dark and absurd way, comic. Shelve it with Lucy Ellmann, Miriam Toews, Jenny Offill; brilliant, disillusioned women in absolute control of glorious prose.” 

—Sarah Moss, The Guardian 

“I’m flabbergasted by the naked determination on show here, not to say the talent. Page by page, image by image, association by association, Pawson develops a picture of the world that you won’t be offered anywhere else: stark, unremitting, brilliantly formed and written.” 

—M. John Harrison

“Although much of the subject matter is solemn, troubling, and an indictment of the horrors of the modern world, there’s beauty and pleasure here too. Pawson’s thoughts are teeming but never cacophonous. At its crescendo, Spent Light shimmers into a modern portrait of the sublime.” 

—Lucy Scholes, The Telegraph

“Every paragraph is an elegant package of new and disturbing ideas . . . Lara Pawson’s writing is brilliant, unnerving and shockingly alive.”

—Miranda France, The Times Literary Supplement

“Vivid, unflinching prose . . .  a way of understanding life and death, human cruelty and suffering. At the same time, there is hope here . . . The book is also a kind of love story.”

—Niamh Donnelly, The Financial Times

“Spent Light coalesces into a Wunderkammer of treasures, memories and mundanities that the reader is invited to view—sometimes repellent, often alluring, always resonant and compelling.”

—Andrew Clarke, The Irish Times

Lara Pawson lives in east London. She is the author of This Is the Place to Be and In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre.

Teju Cole is a novelist, essayist, and photographer. He was the photography critic of the New York Times Magazine from 2015 until 2019. He is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine.

Spent Light • ISBN: 9781968671440

McNALLY EDITIONS no. 57 • Pub: Oct 6, 2026

$19.00 • Paperback with flaps • 5” x 8.5” • 192 pages

Fiction—Autofiction / Political / Women / Literary

Rights: North America

eBook ISBN: 9781968671457