The Still Point

"This is a tremendously assured debut. It’s the story of Julia who is the great-great-niece of an Arctic explorer. She’s got quite a bit of money and doesn’t have to work very much, so she’s decided to write the story of this great-great-uncle, Edward Mackley. There are two parallel stories, his story and hers, and what we realise as the book goes on, is how much of what he did, and the stories about what he did, have imbued her with a sense of identity. The reason it’s so assured is that it does several things at once. One is that it flits in and out of the moment, so some of the time we’re right with Julia and some of the time we’re being told: ‘Dear Reader, look at these people, they’re being quite strange.’ The other thing is that it treads a very fine line between realising how important family is to your own identity and realising how absurd it is that you could be basing what you think about your own life on some story of some great-great-uncle you never met. This is an unusual subject for debut, because it’s about family, which is quite an old-fashioned topic, in some ways. In fact, it has some similarities with The Spider Truces . Novels these days tend to be about identity in terms of race or in terms of religion or history or whatever. This is just a family novel about how we create who we are. I don’t know how much this is the story of who she is. She has done a writing course, we are told in the blurbs, but I know nothing about her."