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.