An excerpt from Ruins, Child by Giada Scodellaro
The following is an excerpt from Ruins Child by Giada Scodellaro (1 Mar 2026), the 2024 winner of The Novel Prize. Set in what may be the future, Ruins, Child centres on six women sharing a space in some sort of crumbling apartment tower.
We’re sitting on the living room carpet watching the 168 hours of footage. The schools are closed up for the Holiday. The footsteps of the children are heavy, running wild. We’re watching the part of the film when the woman is running errands and the like. Our community mostly walks, and there was a time when this woman walked about: back from the market, to the gardens, barefoot from the lake, on the community center table, to the bridge, in the mud, dragging her soles (dirty) around the house – though now she is bedridden. Confined to bed, riding the bed.
We sit up in her house and watch her go still. We watch the footage, and watch her lead the others through the streets. It doesn’t seem right how much the woman walks in the film, the ease of movement, arms swinging, not unlike a piece of metal, the metal metal, metal of waiting, the neighbor Dionne Brand says, or how often the woman remains on her feet.
She’s carrying a purse on her shoulder, a faux-leather, black. Her purchases bagged up by a teen. She carries loads of mustard greens, prune juice, ginger ale, vaseline, butter beans.
And they shadow her. They gather around her, this elusive figure, don’t she move quick? The six of them scale her. They move in unison. Do you know about that? About moving as a unit? It’s harmonious. Here come the six, they used to say, the six mix, here they are: the six fix, six peas in a pod, the six horsemen, the six kings-men, the neighbours would say. Here they come.
And when the woman drops down to tie a shoe they wait for her to finish. And the audience waits, in the living room the children quiet down their games. They check their own little shoes to see if they need tending.
Her thigh is out of place and shiny with oils. She’s gotten the necessary things – the turkey neck, the cowpeas, white vinegar.
The volume is raised up too high, It must be explained, the woman says, yells, profile to the camera, thighs sticking, strawberry skin, razor bumps showing, the mini skirt, climbing, tattoo peeking, walking slow, and all of them walking side by side – it must be explained how the Hill is raised but almost flat, not at all hilly, she says, mouth wide, and it sits on a salt marsh that is known to be sinking. Named after a certain somebody, a politician or something, a something something Hill, the woman says. Do you know about this place?
The group speeds up their walking to keep time with her. Yes, one of them says. Perhaps it was an Augustus Troy Hill or a Jamaal Amenite Hill, we don’t really know.
The woman is beginning to forget, to misplace things, and the others, the six, they let her tell them again, again, A something something Hill, though they know this speech. On her feet: tennis shoes.
The valley is familiar, it is the same now as it was then, during the taping, and before. So we’ve known it and the surrounding flatness for many years, decades. It is sinking a little, but then everything is going down, so today we tell ourselves it is fine, and just the same there is the Holiday, or there is an urge to preserve something. This film, it’s about place, community, she says, being rooted in the Hill, the way we are rooted, okay, and it’s about our Holiday or about tradition, and your place here – you.
Okay, they say. Okay, okay.
The group never uses the word unless there is something silly going on. To sit in the grasses, to talk to the neighbours, to excavate, the woman tells the six. Okay, they repeat. They walk on. They walk behind the gigantic head of this woman, this too tall woman. And get my good side, she says. She towers over them like a pine.
There are hills in the distance, and the fog is down low. The camera captures this. Her pace does not give her age away. The woman is old, and she is with child.
