Wayétu Moore: Liberia then and now
Wayétu Moore’s She Would Be King is a vibrant historical novel about the tumultuous founding of Liberia, shot through with fantastical elements rooted in African fable. The heroine referenced in the title is wild, red-haired Gbessa [pronounced ‘Bessah’], who is cast from her Vai village because she was cursed at birth and deemed to be...
Outback to the future
I didn’t always want to be a writer. When I was at school it just wasn’t the kind of thing I thought you could ‘become’, or, even if it was, how you would ever go about doing so. This was pre-internet, a dark and mysterious time when the sum of all knowledge was the ragged...
Wrong side of the tree line
Central Queensland, Australia, 1885. They stalked the ruined scrubland, searching for something to kill. Two boys, not quite men, tiny in a landscape withered by drought and drenched in unbroken sun. Vast plains pocked with spinifex and clumps of buckbush, grass brittle as old bone, red soil fine as gunpowder underfoot. There’d not been rain...
Olivia Sudjic: Between dreams
Olivia Sudjic’s debut novel Sympathy is a dazzling examination of the morals and customs of our gadget-led lives, a sharp and slippery tale of unreliable identities and assumed connections. It’s narrated by 23-year-old Alice Hare, an unhinged Englishwoman in New York who becomes obsessed with the online presence of 32-year-old Mizuko Himura, a Japanese teacher...
Testing a fantasy
We all have that magic place — the place where we get to be the we that we don’t at home, the place where we should have been born, or moved by our parents if only they had the right judgement. For my mother, that place is London. My best explanation is that, as a...
Elena Lappin: Secrets and lives
In Elena Lappin’s novel The Nose, her protagonist Natasha Kaplan, a young New Yorker in London editing an Anglo-Jewish magazine, discovers more than she’s bargained for when in the course of her new job she ends up uncovering secrets about her own family’s past. “I thought I had invented and imagined it all,” writes Lappin...
Twin Falls
They leave the freeway and cut south through the desert. Soon the canyon comes into view, a great gray crack in the land. Crowds swarm on the far rim, and behind them a dome of trees cloisters a ranch house. The bulge of the launchpad stands at the far end of the crowd, a mound...
As Evel does
Americans love a confident scoundrel. We are willing – some large number of us are, anyway – to forgive myriad flaws, lies and crimes, so long as the offender is charismatic and self-assured. Perhaps this is true of people everywhere, but there is a particular strain of American rogue that populates the nation’s history to...
High
On a sunny summer weekday afternoon, Ed rode his bike to a head shop called Piece of Mind and bought a one-hitter that looked like a realistic sculpture of a cigarette. Ed was twenty-eight years old and single. He was thin and just over six feet tall. He had dark hair cut short and he...
Crushed
How much was the thermometer worth? Five dollars? Ten? It wasn’t worth anything, but I reached into the industrial mixer to grab it, before the mixer, which I had just started, crushed the worthless thermometer. When I reached in, the mixer grabbed me, held my hand, and crushed it. The mixer crushed my hand efficiently...
Rachel Elliott: Breaking the silence
Psychotherapist and writer Rachel Elliot’s spirited debut novel Whispers Through a Megaphone joins together the broken lives of a quiet woman who’s been living in the shadow of her abusive mother and a timid mental health specialist who runs off into the woods when he realises his wife no longer loves him. In Miriam Delaney, Ralph Swoon...
The bazaar and the monastery
The Spring 2015 issue of The Paris Review has a scoop to rival a sit-down with Pynchon: The first in-person interview with Elena Ferrante, in which the notoriously reclusive author explains her anonymity: “This demand for self-promotion diminishes the actual work of art,” she says. “The media simply can’t discuss a work of literature without...
