Bøger af Natasha Soobramanien

Sad and funny and bitter and true, a novel about grief, discovering your own story, and trying to listen for those stories that are not yours to tell. August 2014. Two friends, writers Damaris Caleemootoo and Oliver Pablo Herzberg, arrive in Edinburgh from London, the city that killed Daniel--his brother, her frenemy and loved by them both. Every day is different but the same. Trying to get to the library, they get distracted by bickering--will it rain or not and what should they do about their tanking bitcoin?--in the end failing to write or resist the sadness which follows them as they drift around the city. On such a day they meet Diego, a poet. They learn that Diego's mother was from the Chagos Archipelago, that she and her community were forced to leave their ancestral islands by soldiers in 1973 to make way for a military base. They become obsessed with this notorious episode in British history and the continuing resistance of the Chagossian people, and feel urged to write in solidarity. But how to share a story that is not theirs to tell? Sad, funny and angry, this collaborative fiction builds on the true fact of another: a collaborative fiction created by the British and US governments to dispossess a people of their homeland.

Edinburgh, 2014. Two writer friends, Damaris and Oliver Pablo, escape London, the city that killed his brother. They spend their days trying to get to the library, bickering over their tanking bitcoin, failing to write or resist the sadness. Then they meet Diego, a poet. He tells them he is named for his mother's island in the Chagos Archipelago, which she and her community were forced to leave by British soldiers in 1973. Damaris and Oliver Pablo become obsessed with this notorious episode and the continuing resistance of the Chagossian people, and want to write in solidarity. But how to share a story that is not theirs to tell? And how to account for a loss not theirs to grieve? A tragicomedy interrogating the powers of literature alongside the crimes of the British government, Diego Garcia is a collaborative fiction that opens up possibilities for the novel and seeks other ways of living together.

One morning in May 2003, on the cyclone-ravaged island of Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean, the body of a man washes up on the beach. Six weeks previously, the night Tropical Cyclone Kalunde first gathered force, destruction of another kind hit twenty-six-year-old Genie Lallan and her life in London: after a night out with her brother she wakes up in hospital to discover that he's disappeared. Where has Paul gone and why did he abandon her at the club where she collapsed? Genie's search for him leads her to Rodrigues, sister island to Mauritius - their island of origin, and for Paul, the only place he has ever felt at home. Will Genie track Paul down? And what will she find if she does? An imaginative reworking of the French 18th century classic, 'Paul et Virginie', set in London, Mauritius and Rodrigues, Genie and Paul is an utterly original love story: the story of a sister's love for a lost brother, and the story of his love for an island that has never really existed.