In store now! Diego Garcia by Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams
The most exciting debut novel of the decade, Diego Garcia, not only challenges what we expect from a novel, but also what we imagine our authors to be. Told from a riveting mutual perspective, Diego Garcia is the story of a Marutian immigrant, her best friend, and their desperate flee from London, grief, ‘the sadness’.
Changing the scope of the contemporary political novel, Diego Garcia probes big questions of identity and empire, whilst being an incredibly moving account of a friendship, a commentary on the process of writing, and a means of refuting standard notions of ‘identity’ and ‘nationality’. Perhaps the best novel of the year.
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Order your copy today directly through October Books or buy online through our bookshop store and we’ll get a commission on your purchase.
Diego Garcia by Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams
Paperback £12.99
Edinburgh, 2014: N. and L., two writer friends arrive from London, a city they believe killed L.'s brother. Every day they try to get to the library to write their blocks, but every day they get distracted, bickering over everything from whether or not it's going to rain, to their Bitcoin tanking, trying and failing to resist the sadness which follows them as they drift around the city.
It's on a day like this that they make a new friend, Diego. They go out drinking and swap stories. Diego tells them he is named after his mother's island in the Indian Ocean, part of the Chagos Archipelago, which she and her community were forced to leave by armed soldiers in 1973. The writers become obsessed with this shameful episode in British history and the continuing exile of the Chagossian people.
Angry and sad and funny, this collaborative fiction set in Edinburgh, London and Brussels is about grief and friendship, and about trying to work out how, as a writer, you share a story that needs to be heard if it is not your story to tell.
But ultimately Diego Garcia a novel about the true fact of a collaborative fiction authored by the US and British governments, created to maintain military power and to dispossess a people of their homeland.
Order your copy today directly from October Books or buy online through our bookshop store and we’ll get commission on your purchase.
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