Sterling Karat Gold begins with an absurd arrest and then does what any sensible novel would do: brings in bullfighters, footballers, time travel, Google Earth tourists, queer friendship, class violence, state power, and a giraffe.

Isabel Waidner’s world is surreal, funny, furious, and structurally slippery — a novel where injustice is not rendered as solemn realism, but as a bureaucratic hallucination with excellent shoes. This is one for readers who like fiction that mutates while you’re holding it: part anti-state farce, part queer revenge portal, part experimental London novel.

It has the legal-nightmare logic of Kafka, but with more camp, more tenderness, and much better awareness of how power actually moves through race, class, gender, surveillance, and the everyday theatre of being made suspicious.

First edition / first printing, Peninsula Press paperback, 2021. Very good, with light shelf wear to cover edges and corners. Clean internally.