An astonishing, kaleidoscopic novel about heartbreak, imagination, electronic music and grief, from the award-winning author of Keeping the House.

Our unnamed narrator survives in London and Newark on a combination of Universal Credit, music production and songwriting, trying to figure out what she wants from home, and whether anyone is prepared to give it to her. Navigating love affairs and halted by pain following the loss of her closest confidante, Safe Spaces is a portrait of the artist as a young musician. Of the DJ booths and dances that shape her, and the worlds she finds herself in: be they local raves, her Turkish-Cypriot family, the beauty parlour or the studio. At once a songbook, a found poem of place, a therapy transcript and a community journal, Safe Spaces is a work of extraordinary lyricism and candour, confirming Tice Cin as one of the foremost stylists of her generation. A deeply intimate portrait of a community and a moving personal reckoning, it fearlessly asks: can the dream of a safe space ever be realised?

"At first discordant, finally symphonic, Cin captures the heavy beat of her city's blood, its healing music, in ways that recall and update the vivid prose-poetry of Clarence Major and Elizabeth Smart. This is an honest, intimate, grief-soaked work of experiential wonder" - author of Oxblood

"In Safe Spaces, Tice Cin whispers a whole world into being; a deeply intimate and lyrical book, shot through with wry observation, it alchemises the cold violence of loss into something healing and relentlessly alive" - author of I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning

"No one has ever quite captured the essence of London like her" - Sheerluxe