We Live Here Now
We Live Here Now is the winner of the 2025 Goldsmiths Prize.
DeLillo meets Kafka in a wickedly smart 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.
About the author
C.D. Rose is the author of four previous books, including The Blind Accordionist and Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea. His short stories have appeared in Gorse, 3AM, The Quietus, and Best British Short Stories. He currently lives in Hebden Bridge.
Judge Simon Okotie on We Live Here Now
"A dizzying, encyclopaedic series of stories linked by texture, resonance and suggestion, We Live Here Now is a novel of immense scope and subtlety. Exploring the repercussions of twelve individuals’ involvement in a famous conceptual artist’s installation, it traces the invisible circuits and networks – of love, capital and war – that shape our contemporary lived experience."
Read our news story about this year's winner.