Tice Cin's Safe Spaces explores grief and music in London

Tice Cin's philosophical new novel, Safe Spaces, follows a young Turkish-Cypriot songwriter and music producer handling grief and precarity in London. The book 2026, extends the themes of friendship and community from her 2021 debut, Keeping the House, blending elegy, spoken-word poetry, and journalistic meditation.

A Life Mapped by Doorways

The unnamed narrator calculates her life by doorways, walking past each one without a clear roadmap. Her hurts come in different shapes, from childhood abandonment to sexism in the creative industries and the instability of short-term flatshares while on universal credit. The Guardian's review notes the character's perspective on financial struggle: "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." This journey is mapped onto the wider experiences of London's working-class, inner-city diaspora communities.

The Central Loss

At the heart of the novel is the death of the narrator's closest confidante, referred to only as "My Favourite Person." As gossip circulates about his untimely death, she directly addresses those questioning how he died. The narrator describes the relentless inquiry as "the loop, the scaffolding, never comes down, this con of process." She continues to mourn through remembered late-night calls and unheard voicemails, expressing a fear of moving forward alone.

Creative Survival

The book explores how to survive in a world darkened by unshakeable loss. The narrator attempts to articulate herself through love affairs, short-term jobs, DJ booths, dancefloors, therapy sessions, and beauty parlours. Memories are likened to a messy laundry cupboard, with items perpetually falling out. Cin writes, "Sometimes my head feels like the city, ambulances going past 24/7 but we still hear nothing."

Kaleidoscopic Form

Cin employs a dexterous, shape-shifting narrative form to match her protagonist's world. Told in first-person vignettes largely without character names, many sections are prefaced with clarifications about who is being addressed. Examples from the text include "The ‘you’ is reading me. The ‘me’ is still me" and "I am ‘her’ and ‘you’." The Guardian's review suggests these shifting perspectives create the impression of a DJ spinning tracks, mirroring the protagonist's deep immersion in music.

In her own imagined safe space, the narrator becomes "a marshmallow gravity genie who sleeps facefront on a soft cloud," floating away from earthly concerns. The novel is ultimately described as a tender search for a foothold in an alienating world, repeatedly asking its reader, "So, are you listening?"