Tice Cin's Safe Spaces: An Elegy in Spoken Word

Tice Cin's new novel Safe Spaces is part spoken-word poem, part journalistic meditation — an inventive, tender story of a young songwriter's journey through love and loss in London.

The book, a philosophical and poetic work about a young Turkish-Cypriot songwriter and music producer, extends the preoccupations of Cin's prizewinning debut, 2021's Keeping the House. That first novel earned the author a reputation as a writer to watch; the sophomore effort confirms the trajectory.

Again, this is a story of friendship, precarity and community. It is at once an elegy, a spoken-word poem and a journalistic meditation — one that repeatedly asks readers: "So, are you listening?"

The narrator remains unnamed. For her, "hurts come in different shapes each time": from the childhood scars of her father's abandonment, to sexism in the creative scene, to the difficulties of navigating short-lived flatshares on universal credit.

Cin gives that economic precarity a blunt voice of its own. "If you don't know about being money dry, if you don't know loss – you don't get it," the narrator says. "If you know, you know."

The novel maps the narrator's journey of personal discovery onto the contemporary travails of London's wider working-class inner-city diaspora communities. She calculates her life by doorways, "walking past each one" without a roadmap for her personal and professional goals.

The result is a kaleidoscopic vision of precarity, music and grief — one that positions Cin among the most distinctive chroniclers of London's working-class creative life now writing.