Alex Hyde's second novel, Exhibition, lands the reader in the middle of the Young British Artists explosion — the 1990s London art scene that turned Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and their peers into household names. The Guardian reviewed the novel on 3 August 2026, describing it as an elegiac love letter to that era. (The Guardian)

The book is a Künstlerroman — a novel about an artist's formation — centred on Rabble Stone, a working-class photography student who moves to London and finds herself orbiting a scene where sensation and provocation were the currency. Hyde tells the story through a series of reminiscences addressed to an unnamed, now-deceased artist, giving the novel the shape of a letter to someone who can no longer write back.

That deceased artist's work, as described on the page, evokes Tracey Emin — the British artist whose confessional installations, including the famous tent embroidered with the names of everyone she had ever slept with, made her one of the most recognisable figures of the YBA movement. The Guardian's review notes the echo without confirming a direct portrait; the character remains fictional, the resemblance a matter of texture rather than identification.

For Hyde, Exhibition follows a debut that already turned heads. The Guardian reviewed her first novel, Violets, in February 2022, calling it "a daring debut." (The Guardian) The leap from a first book praised for its boldness to a second novel set inside one of British art's most mythologised decades gives Exhibition a particular weight: a writer with a proven appetite for risk taking on a period that still looms large in the cultural imagination.

The YBA era — roughly the late 1980s through the mid-1990s — was defined by a group of recently graduated artists who staged their own exhibitions, courted media controversy, and saw their work snapped up by collector Charles Saatchi. Hyde's decision to filter that world through a working-class character, rather than through the artists themselves, reframes a story usually told from the top of the art world's hierarchy.

Rabble Stone's perspective — a student looking in from the margins, remembering someone she lost — gives Exhibition its emotional structure. The novel is less a chronicle of the scene than an act of mourning set against its backdrop.