Holding on to the plot
“My marriage ended because I was cruel. Or because I ate in bed. Or because he liked electronic music and difficult films about men in nature. Or because I did not. Or because I was anxious, and this made me controlling. Or because red wine makes me critical. Or because hunger, stress, and white wine...
An experiment in history
Set in 1830s British North America, my debut novel, The Voyageur, is about an orphan named Alex who falls in love with a rum-guzzling fur trader and follows the older man into the hallucinogenic wilderness of the Great Lakes, only to be shot in the stomach when a trading-post robbery goes off the rails. Present...
The horror of the self
In November 1979, the American current affairs programme 60 Minutes ran an item called ‘Wellness’. In it, host Dan Rather profiled the work of Dr John Travis, a former physician-turned health educator who had, in 1975, opened the Wellness Resource Center in Mill Valley, an affluent city in California’s Marin County. As Rather discovered, Travis...
We need to do the impossible, because what’s merely possible is gonna get us all killed
We can debate whether the problem is Us or Them. We can endlessly parse false and real solutions, and fight over what – given prevailing political realities – we’re willing to consider “good enough.” We can argue whether to focus on mitigation, adaptation, or suffering. We can quarrel over whether our salvation lies in individual...
Orlando Ortega-Medina: Love without borders
Orlando Ortega-Medina’s riveting novel The Fitful Sleep of Immigrants wears its politics on its sleeve. Beyond the inclusion of the perennially hot-button word Immigrants in its title, one needs only to peel back the front cover and read the dedication to find the first direct iteration of its author’s message: “To the countless multinational same-sex...
Keeping mum
In Ainslie Hogarth’s gripping and darkly comic modern gothic novel Motherthing, Abby Lamb’s mother-in-law Laura’s endless sniping and put-downs come to an abrupt end when she slashes her wrists in the family basement. But then Laura’s ghost takes up the mantle, and begins to terrorise Abby with still greater venom, just as Abby is left to cope...
Blind ricochets and unexpected avenues
“We want Jack! We want Jack! We want Jack!” It starts with just one voice, some anonymous drunken loser without a girlfriend to embarrass, hidden deep within the chattering mass of denim and leather. Cliché to begin with, those three syllables sound particularly obnoxious coming from just one person. But a restless herd of kindred...
Ink blots in the trunk
Every aspiring writer is familiar with the concept of the ‘trunk novel’. This is the novel that doesn’t make it to the bookshelf, but instead gets tucked into a bottom desk drawer or old USB drive after refusing to do what its writer wants it to do. Often it’s the writer’s first attempt at a...
Tessa McWatt: A place in the world
Tessa McWatt’s The Snow Line throws together four strangers at a wedding in the Indian Himalayan foothills. Twenty-five-year-old Reema is a classical singer born in India but raised as a Londoner, who has travelled without her Scottish boyfriend. Having recently discovered she is pregnant, she is facing a life-shifting decision about her future. Yosh is...
Alone at last: The secret of Marian Engel’s Bear
A woman is sent to an island for a summer. The island holds little more than a house, although admittedly a big one for this remote territory, and strangely shaped too, with eight sides and no real corners, two levels, many windows – ridiculous anywhere but especially here, where you need a fire most of...
Nasim’s story
I moved to New York in January 2014 to start reporting New Yorkers. I had spent the previous decade researching, reporting and writing two books about other places. They were based on my experiences interviewing a wide array of people to get a feel for their lives, their work and the places they made. For...
Bearing witness
Before discussing the far-reaching scope of Kim Echlin’s Speak, Silence, and the enormity of the issues it illuminates, let’s zoom in close: amid a tryst in a hotel room at The Hague one evening, a female reporter covering the trial of a Bosnian war criminal prods her companion, the Dutch guard assigned to watch over...
