The Lake

"The Lake reads like a dystopian novel, but is firmly rooted in reality: not only the reality of man-made climate change, but also the post-Soviet realities across Europe and Central Asia. It’s about a young boy called Nami who lives with his grandparents in a fishing village on the shores of a shrinking lake that’s drying up. He appears to be an orphan, but he goes in search of his mother who has seemingly abandoned him. There’s also the mystery of his father: what is his paternity, who was his father? It’s an almost mythic coming-of-age quest novel. It’s set in an unnamed land and yet there’s a square in the town with a statue of an unspecified statesman, and it’s recognizably post-Soviet Central Asia. There are certain clues—the caviar and fisheries and the kolkhoz or collective cotton farms, which are a very Soviet feature. The author told me the book was inspired by a National Geographic story about the shrinking of the Aral Sea, which is in Central Asia, in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. She didn’t go there or research the sea, it just sparked something in her imagination. She is Czech with Bulgarian ancestry, and she combined this environmental catastrophe with her own knowledge of post-communist life in different countries. Almost everything in the book is unnamed—the statesman, the country, the town. But there is a Russian occupying force, who are called ‘Russkiys’ by the children. They are growing up during a very violent occupation, seeing things, and suffering, that children should never witness. Women are preyed upon by these soldiers. The author told me that she tried to make it less specific, initially, and then found it didn’t work for her. It was false, because the reality for her in the region with which she’s familiar is that Russians have been the occupying power. So that is interesting, this combination of a stubborn element of reality with this very heavily fictionalised and mythical setting. This book won the first year I was a judge. It originally came out in 2016 and was published in translation in 2021 by Parthian Books, a publisher based in Wales. For me, the novel is Lord of the Flies meets A Clockwork Orange in that sudden, sporadic, casual violence that erupts, and at the same time, this child’s eye view as he’s moving through it. So we found The Lake extremely powerful and also universal. As with all good fiction, you can read into the specific circumstances many other scenarios. I think it’s absolutely a page-turner, but I know the author would object to the term dystopian. A dystopia is an imagined opposite of utopia, and this is much more about reality.Like Sons, Daughters it’s immersive in that way with really good fiction when you’re immediately transported somewhere else and you just want to be left alone with your book."