Aspiring writer Sterling is arrested one morning, without having done anything wrong. Plunged into a terrifying and nonsensical world, Sterling - with the help of their three best friends - must defy bullfighters, football legends, spaceships, and Google Earth tourists in order to exonerate themselves and to hold the powers that be to account. Sterling Karat Gold is Kafka's The Trial written for the era of gaslighting, a surreal inquiry into the very real effects of state violence and coercion on gender-nonconforming, working-class, and Black bodies.

Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize Polar bears emerge from t-shirts. Reeboks come to life. Nothing is normal in the house of Mother Normal. In Isabel Waidner's second novel, we follow an unnamed narrator who looks like Eleven from Stranger Things, but is in fact a 36-year-old migrant working for minimum wage in a run-down hotel on the Isle of Wight. Along with their best friend, Shae, the narrator faces Ukip activists, shapeshifting creatures, and despotic bosses while trying to hold down their job and preparing for their Life in the UK test. This is fiction that extends the avant-garde tradition beyond the upper-class experience that it usually chronicles - making it over as an ally of working-class queer experience. Set against a backdrop of austerity and decline, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff is an irreverent, boundary-erasing piece of work that celebrates the radical potential of resistance, ingenuity, and friendship.

The radical, joyful follow-up to the Goldsmiths Prize-winning Sterling Karat Gold. This is the story of Corey Fah, a writer on the cusp of a windfall, courtesy of the Social Evils prize committee, for whom the actual gong - and with it the prize money - remains tantalizingly out of reach. Neon beige, with UFO-like qualities, the elusive trophy leads Corey, with partner Drew and surprise eight-legged companion Bambi Pavok, on a spectacular detour through their childhood in the Forest - via an unlikely stint on reality TV. Navigating those twin horrors, through wormholes and time loops, Corey learns - the hard way - the difference between a prize and a gift. Both radiant and revolutionary, Isabel Waidner's fiction gleefully takes a hammer to false binaries, boundaries and borders, turning walls into bridges and words into wings. Fierce, fluid and funny, they free us to imagine another way of being. This is a novel about coming into one's own, the labour of love, the tendency of history to repeat itself and the pitfalls of social mobility. It's about watching TV with your lover. Praise for Sterling Karat Gold: 'A piece of winged originality' Ali Smith 'A beautifully defiant miracle of a book' Guy Gunarante 'A sublime, mesmerizing feat' Irenonsen Okojie 'A provocative act of resistance to our morally slippery times. Reading Waidner is like plugging into an electric socket of language and ideas' Guardian