The Guardian ·
Safe Spaces by Tice Cin review – a kaleidoscopic vision of precarity, music and grief
Part spoken-word poem, part journalistic meditation, this is an inventive, tender novel of a songwriter’s journey through love and loss in London
Tice Cin’s philosophical and poetic new novel about a young Turkish-Cypriot songwriter and music producer extends the preoccupations of her prizewinning debut, 2021’s Keeping the House. This intimately told sophomore novel, again a story of friendship, precarity and community, is at once an elegy, a spoken-word poem and a journalistic meditation, repeatedly asking readers: “So, are you listening?”
For our unnamed narrator, “hurts come in different shapes each time”: from the childhood scars of her father’s abandonment, to sexism in the creative scene and the difficulties of navigating short-lived flatshares on universal credit (“If you don’t know about being money dry, if you don’t know loss – you don’t get it. If you know, you know”). Her journey of personal discovery is mapped on to the contemporary travails of London’s wider working-class inner-city diaspora communities as she calculates her life by doorways, “walking past each one” without a roadmap for her personal and professional goals.
At the centre of the novel is the loss of the narrator’s closest confidante, referred to as “My Favourite Person”. As his untimely death becomes fodder for gossip, she addresses those questioning how he died: “You’re asking for information but to me it’s the loop, the scaffolding, never comes down, this con of process, all dying to know how he died.” Meanwhile, she remembers their late-night phone calls, continues to leave him unheard voicemails: “Don’t want to do it all without you on my team.”
