This was an enjoyable whirlwind of an experience to read! It’s an experimental work of rewriting-history-with-fiction, centring on our main characters fascination with the ‘Bright Young Things’, a group of Black avant-garde poets from the 1920s who have been mysteriously written out of history. 

The first arm of the story is the present day, where our MC is an archivist who wins a position on a prestigious and pompous artistic residency, the kind that early-career artists dream of, the kind that could set you up for life. The second arm is a series of flashbacks to the turn of the century, seen through the yes of Hermia Druitt, one of the Bright Young Things. The third arm is a series of excerpts from an art history textbook explaining more of the Bright Young Things and their absence from history.

For me, the story was a greatly enjoyable exercise in using the novel to display many important conversations and questions to today in the worlds of art history incl, how to combat and reverse the erasure of Black people and their contributions, and how to operate as an artist or cultural worker within  the ever-self-inflated and (maybe predatory?) practices of the art and educational industries. 

The novel is a fat chunk of heady, “big brained” philosophical questions about art, education, history, and race, wrapped up in the lives of characters which are fully rounded, not necessarily lilywhite  and likeable or moustache-twirling ly evil; they are people. Throw all of that in an epistolary, sometimes deliberately hazy, self-reflexive narrative and you get something like Lote. 

Strong recommend, but the first quarter of the book was hard to follow.