Longlisted for the
2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize
Judges’ Citation: “A strange, sombre novel in which a troubled young writer unpacks the legacy of his religious upbringing. Told in the form of a memoir, prone to Bernhardian digressions, it devolves into a quietly absorbing meditation on literature, mortality, and sexual shame.”
Reviewed by Paul Franz in
The Metropolitan Review
“Absorbing and intense, fraught with implications… one finds moments where, less at the level of the sentence than of the paragraph, Gerke shows his ability to take you by the hand and lead you on a forbidding and exhilarating ascent. It is the debut of a significant writer.”
