We Live Here Now - by C D Rose (Paperback)

About the Book

"When visitors to a famous conceptual artist's installation start mysteriously disappearing, the aftershocks radiate outwards through twelve people who were involved in the project, changing all of their lives, and launching them on a crazy-quilt trajectory that will end with them all together at one final, apocalyptic bacchanal"--

Book Synopsis

WINNER OF THE 2025 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE


A wickedly smart, Borgesian novel that explores the boundaries between art and life, vision and reality, beauty and commerce . . .

When visitors to a famous conceptual artist's installation start mysteriously disappearing, the aftershocks radiate outwards through twelve people who were involved in the project, changing all of their lives, and launching them on a crazy-quilt trajectory that will end with them all together at one final, apocalyptic bacchanal.

Mixing illusion and reality, simulacra and replicants, sound artists and death artists, performers and filmmakers and theorists and journalists, We Live Here Now ranges across the world of weapons dealers and international shipping to the galleries and studios on the cutting edge of hyper-contemporary art. It spins a dazzling web that conveys, with eerie precision, the sheer strangeness of what it is like to be alive today.

Review Quotes

Winner of the 2025 Goldsmiths Prize!

"A book about what art is and what it does (or doesn't do), C.D. Rose's We Live Here Now in its turn asks profound questions of the contemporary world and the systems that power it, in the aether, deep under the surface, far out at sea. Motifs emerge and recur: containers, erasures, shady markets, sound and silence, 'echo and drone'. This constellatory novel tests the bounds of the form while delivering all of its satisfactions: at once hilarious and deeply haunting, intellectually challenging and supremely entertaining." --Amy Sackville, author of Orkney and Chair of Judges for the Goldsmiths Prize, 2025

"C.D. Rose's genius novel . . . is a book that shows it is possible for a novel to be at once highly original and to fit within an established tradition... We Live Here Now is both accessible and challenging, entertaining the reader with its ridiculous and sinister figures, even as it prompts more intellectual questions about the reality of appearances." -- John Self, The Daily Telegraph

"The novel "We Live Here Now" tracks the uncanny experiences of people connected to a mysterious installation artist." -- The New York Times

"Beguiling and surreal .... A diverting literary puzzle." -- Publishers Weekly

"In this deeply rewarding novel considering many under-discussed aspects of contemporary commerce, Rose has produced another breathtakingly imaginative work." -- Booklist

About the Author

C.D. Rose is the author of four previous books including The Blind Accordionist, Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea, and Who's Who When Everyone is Someone Else. He was awarded The Goldsmiths Prize in 2025. He currently teaches at the University of Birmingham in Birmingham, England.