Episode One: Deepa Anappara

The Hypothetical Bookshelf launches with the talented, award-winning Deepa Anappara. Deepa grew up in Kerala, southern India, and was an award-winning journalist in cities including Mumbai and Delhi. Her debut novel, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, was named as one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Guardian, and NPR. It won the Edgar Award for Best Novel, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Indian Literature. It has been translated into over twenty languages. Deepa is also the co-editor, with Taymoor Soomro, of Letters to a Writer of Colour, a collection of personal essays on fiction, race, and culture. Her second novel, The Last of Earth, came out earlier this year.

Listen for Deepa's five books, see bookshop.org for links to books discussed.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:22

Hello, welcome to the hypothetical bookshelf, a kind of desert island districts for books. Inspired by Italo Calvino's essay, Whom Do We Write For? or The Hypothetical Bookshelf, this is a podcast that asks writers what other works their writing is in conversation with. Looking for new ways new work can make connections between different books on a writer's and reader's hypothetical shelf. I'll be interviewing a different author each time and asking them to name five books of fiction or non-fiction that can be put beside their own on that imaginary bookshelf. Calvino also writes about how this juxtaposition and conversation between different works can question the established scale of values and code of meanings generally accepted by the wider culture. And I'm keen to test that theory, asking authors about different approaches to storytelling techniques and traditions to inspire listeners with new reading lists and new creative practices. I am absolutely delighted to start the series by speaking with Deepa Anafara. Welcome, Deeper. Deeper grew up in Kerala, Southern India, and was an award-winning journalist in cities including Mumbai and Delhi. Her debut novel, June Patrol on the Purple Line, was named as one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, The Guardian, and NPR. It won the Edgar Award for Best Novel, was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Indian Literature. It's been translated into over 20 languages. Deeper is also the co-editor with Tamor Sumaru of Letters to a Writer of Colour, a collection of personal essays on fiction, race and culture, and her second novel, which has just come out, The Last of the Earth. One of the BBC's twelve books you need to read in 2026. Welcome, Deeper. It's great to be talking with you. Thank you so much for having me, Rebecca. I am very excited to kind of talk through all of your books, but I wondered uh if we could begin with letters to a writer of colour, because my interest in creating this broadcast is kind of partly inspired by the book's approach to examining how it is we make books. Um and in the introduction, you and Tamor Sumro write across the world, there is now an understanding of the racial and cultural biases in various bodies of knowledge, such as history, medicine, and art, and an awareness that we should make space in these epistemologies for women, people of colour, LGBTQ people, and the working class? What if we similarly re-evaluated the codes and conventions that over time have moulded our assumptions about how fiction should be written? What form would a more inclusive approach to storytelling take? How could we challenge popular writing maxims that may not be in keeping with our cultural ethos? How did writers of colour centre their lived experiences, race, and culture in their fiction? Now, you obviously you've got an essay in that collection, which I encourage everyone to go and read. It's a brilliant collection. And you've considered these ideas critically. And I wondered how how that critical approach has impacted the practice of your writing.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

The reason Temur and I put the book together was because we were coming up against these obstacles when we were students of writing. So for instance, you know, you're encouraged to show, don't tell. And at the same time, if you're a writer from a different culture, you are asked to explain your culture so that it's easily digestible for the Western reader who's not familiar with that culture. So something as simple as an autorecture, which is a vehicle that's you know on every Indian road, um, somebody in the West may not know what an autorecture is. So then when we write, you know, our character, say X took an autorecture, and then are you expected or to put a comma and say it's a three-wheeler, um, you know, which runs on gas or it runs on um a CNG, which is a form of sustainable eco-gas. So uh, but then it interrupts the flow of the narrative. It feels very untrue to the character because why would a character who lives in that world even need an explanation for what an autorecture is? Um, so we were coming up against all these questions and there were no answers to that, which is essentially why we put this book together. Uh, we asked writers to talk about how they approached these questions. And um, when I started out, I felt this uh pressure to fit into the demands of the Western marketplace because I'm an Indian writer and I'm living in the UK. Um and you know, I'm sending my work out to people here. Um, they're not, they may not be familiar with Indian culture at all. So initially I did feel that pressure that I had to write according to these maxims. I felt that I was failing as a writer because the kind of books and the kind of writing that is held up as an example, uh, you know, to aspire to, say, Hemingway or Carver, the writing is very minimalist. And whereas where where I come from, the language is can be quite ornate. It's very dense with imagery. And if you write like that, you feel you're essentially a failure. So I was consistently trying in my early years to meet the standards of a Western readership and a Western publishing industry. And I um it was only later that I started questioning why am I doing this and is this really appropriate for the characters or for the story? Um, and I think since writing the book, uh since editing the book, sorry, or co-editing the book, uh, what I realized was that these are questions that every almost every other person of color is in the West and publishing in the West is grappling with. And I didn't, I just didn't realize that, you know, to the um, I just imagined that I'm a very sensitive person, an extremely neurotic person, and maybe that's why I have all these questions. But what I realized in, you know, when Temura and I put this anthology, the collection of essays together is that it's something that almost every person of color at a certain point uh has to negotiate and they have to figure out for themselves what is it that they want to do. And for some writers, the answer might be that I am going to explain what an autoriksha is because I want a wider readership. And for, you know, for myself, the decision was that I was not going to explain anything. And I really look to these uh works by certain writers of color and how they had approached this storytelling for you know both permission and courage. Um, often, you know, you spoke about how every writer is in conversation with other texts. And uh for me, I think personally, I'm not just looking for um lyrical, beautiful sentences, though that is definitely something that you know I do want from the books that I read. But also I think I'm looking for permission to try out different things and permission to not fit into the conventional story arcs that uh we typically teach in creative writing programs, including, you know, the Aristotelian narrative arc or the Freytax pyramid and you know, with the climax and um the denominant. Um, how do you write, you know, is that how we tell our stories? And I think I've been thinking more and more about that in recent years. And um, you know, there's always that conflict within you as a writer. I don't know if you experienced this, Rebecca. Uh, but for me, I'm you know, sometimes I wonder, I do want my books to sell, I want a readership, I want my books to pay the bills. Uh, but then on the other hand, there is also this part of me that doesn't want to uh, you know, subsume the tendencies that, or you know, subsume the culture that I come from and the ways in which we told or we the kind of stories that I was told as a child. Do I really want to move away from that? So I do find often that I'm in conflict with both those questions. And ultimately, I think I do try to write in a way that feels um authentic to myself, uh, in a way that feels that I'm not betraying, you know, my storytelling traditions because ultimately, you know, why write otherwise?

SPEAKER_02 9:00

Amazing. Yeah. Um one of the things I wanted to ask you about your most recent novel, The Last of the Earth, which I probably ought to wait to ask you about, is actually to do with this notion of borders. The whole book is set on that borderline between Tibet and India. And there are so many other aspects of the novel that are also kind of on the edges between things. You know, there's the edge of, you know, um, one of one of your characters, Catherine, who's a sort of a female explorer from England, but at the same time, she's also half Indian, although it takes her a while to kind of come out and discuss that. So she's kind of like exploring her own identity. Is she one thing? Is she the other? Um, and and how does that make her different, you know. But then you have other characters who are in who are also exploring their sexuality. So there's a sense in which there's a borderline between desire and friendship. Um, there's the whole idea of kind of, you know, master and and you know, employee. Uh a lot of that is going on, like, you know, um, with the idea of the kind of colonizer and who they're employing to help them achieve these wonderful feats, because the book is exploring how um, you know, the English were kind of trying to map out a way into Tibet. And um, you could describe this much better than me, but it seems to me that in a way what you've just said fits very neatly in with a lot of that, that in a way you're you're kind of having to walk quite an interesting tightrope to it do some form of explanation, but at the same time, actually, you need to be true to you know the stories that matter to you. Does any of that I've talked far too much.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

Um no, that's great. I think that's that's exactly it. Um, in the book, in The Last Referred, I was very interested in uh looking at those dichotomies, which can often be false between what is science and what is reason, and what is accepted as science and what is seen as superstition. And there was a notion which we may still find exists, that you know, uh India is a deeply spiritual, in some ways exotic and mysterious country. And the same holds true for Tibet in popular imagination, even today. So if there is, say, a Tibetan belief or an Indian belief, the tendency may be to file that under superstition as opposed to logic and reasoning or science. And in fact, when you look at how the Tibetans, for instance, look at their own landscape and how they hold it as sacred. And if we say classify that as a superstition, we are doing uh, you know, it's quite unfair on them, it's a grave injustice. Uh, primarily because, you know, seeing, understanding that you don't control nature is in many ways uh helpful. And as we can see today, that you know, there's uh in in times of climate change, we can see that um as humans, we hold so little power. And understanding, say, the primacy of nature or understanding that nature is not just there for exploitation, not just there to serve us, is in many ways, would have in many ways mitigated many of the challenges that you know we are seeing today. So I wanted to look at what was what has always been thought of as science and what has always been thought of reasoning. And so there is that border between uh, you know, or it may be a false border or it doesn't even exist. And the book, even though it's a book about mapping and cartography, it's really looking at um those questions. Do these borders that we draw, do they have any meaning? And in some ways, the quest, you know, the exploration or the quest novel, the adventure novel, it follows that very traditional trajectory. The person sets out on a quest. Um, they face multiple obstacles, and by the end, they may have changed as a person and they may achieve their goal, or maybe in a few cases not achieved their goal. And uh so that a very basic um structural format was there in my mind, but I really wanted to push against that with the Snow.

SPEAKER_02 13:22

Yeah, I think you've done that very successfully, and I definitely am going to come back and ask you about that. Um, I wondered if we could go back to the five books and look in particular at your first one, because as far as I understand it, and I could be, I could be uh wrong, so I'm hoping you'll tell me more. Is that um, so you've chosen, and forgive my pronunciation, Random Musam by Vasan Devan Nair. So please you can correct me in a second. Um it's translates into English, or one of the versions is Beemer Lone Warrior. Um, and it's is it am I right in saying that it's part of the Mahabharata?

SPEAKER_00 14:01

Uh that's right. It's a retelling of Mahabharata, which is a Hindu epic. Uh, so I'm not a religious person, but uh, you know, I grew up in a Hindu family, and uh, we were very familiar with these stories. Um, at one time, I think it was even on television, it was very common for these stories to be made into long-running TV series, and the entire family would, you know, sit in front of the TV to watch that, and some people would have prayers. And yeah, it was just like a not just a spiritual, but in many ways a communal experience for people who practiced the Hindu religion. Um, I um so of course, I when I was growing up, I had a kind of good idea about the stories in these epics. I don't think I ever read them from cover to cover. It's a very complicated story. In fact, when it came out, I think there were experts who actually said the story doesn't make any sense. It has uh, you know, frame within a frame within a frame kind of narrative, and it's very complicated. Uh, but the gist of the story is that uh, you know, there are these cousins, two sets of uh brothers in these two families, and they are um essentially they end up at war uh with each other uh about inheritance and about legacy and ruling the country. Uh it's you know, the Bhagavad Gita is part of the Mahabharata, and as people might be aware, Gita is a philosophical treatise looking at, you know, should we actually be fighting against our own uh family members and what is right and wrong and what is morally correct uh in a situation like that when uh you know you have to kill people, is that ever morally right in a battlefield? So um it is a book that looks at all these uh philosophical questions in many ways as well. Um, but of course, you know, when you're um it is a religious text, and this is how I came to know it as a child. And I looked at all these characters essentially like gods, and uh, you know, their actions were not always um in some ways, they were meant to be um, I guess it was a way to teach you morality, like you know, stories from the Bible, I guess, have a similar function. Um, but what was interesting for me uh when M T Vastevan Naya is a he was a very famous uh writer in Malayalam, very popular, and his books would go into 40 rupee prints. I think he sold over a million copies just in Malayalam, which is my mother tongue, and spoken in Kerala, which is a very small state, so it is a huge feat. And uh so what he did with this book, uh it's uh called Randam Uram. Essentially, it means the second turn or a second chance. What he did was he centered the story of one of the brothers who's uh Bhima and he's the second son. Um, and um, you know, just twisting that story and showing it from his, not really twisting, that's a wrong word, but presenting the story from his perspective, this whole epic looks completely different. And uh I read the book when I was a child. Um, it was serialized in uh Malayalam magazine. So I would wait every Monday to read the next installment. Um, and what really surprised me was that, you know, uh Bhima as a character in the original epic is he's a very strong muscular person. He's essentially the henchman of the set of brothers who are the good or the moral, um, you know, the moral side of this family. Um, and he eats a lot, and his appetite is often mentioned in maybe some humorous contexts as well. But uh when we see the story from his point of view, you know, he's a he's a deep thinker, he has all these um feelings about how he's being treated. And I had not even, you know, as a kid, you don't have this idea that everyone is experiencing the same moment differently. And uh reading the Mahabharata as told from Bhima's perspective really brought that home for me. And I think for me, it was the first time I could see uh the power of fiction in many ways that this is what you can do, you know, in a in a novel, if you change the perspective, um the story becomes completely different. Um, and it also in many ways humanized these characters I had only seen as gods. So we see them as these very flawed people wrestling with their conscience and wrestling with these decisions that they have to make, in which, you know, there's no real winner, and uh you are fighting against your own family, you're losing members of your own family. And um, I, you know, the original Mahabharata, the ways in which I had uh approached it, it didn't really uh show me those different facets of their character. And for me, what this book did was to, yeah, um, it it just introduced me to the concept of perspective, I guess, which I hadn't thought of at all. And as a child, I had no understanding that you know the world is not exactly as it appears to me.

SPEAKER_02 19:23

Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, the book sounds so interesting, and also it sounds to me like already it's exploring a form which is quite different, perhaps, to many of the books that I might have been introduced to as a child. Um, you said there's lots of stories within stories, there's a kind of you know, um a large kind of philosophical aspect um that sounds like it's maintained in this version.

SPEAKER_00 19:50

Um not so much, I would say. It's very, I think part of the reason I could read it as a child is that it has a very engaging narrative and it's very much focused on uh B Bhima's point of view. And so he's the second of the five sons, and we see the story from his perspective. So it loses some of that uh the conventions in the original book, um, in the form that it exists. You know, it is an epic and it was it's believed that it was told as uh narrated as poems, recited by Bots as they went around uh, you know, different parts of what is today India. Uh but uh what empty uh as he's commonly referred to in my part of the world, what he did was to uh narrow it down to just Pima's perspective. Um, and what does this world look like, you know, from this perspective of a man who's very powerful, who's very strong, who can lift mountains, but then he's presented as such a gentle character who's quite sensitive, and that was very surprising for me.

SPEAKER_02 20:54

It definitely makes me want to read the whole thing. So this is from the beginning.

SPEAKER_00 20:59

The sea was black in color, the waves dashed against the shore, screaming, as if devering the palace and the great city of Dwarka had not ceded their hunger. The five of them stood on the rocks, gazing at the scene below in amazement, in disbelief. In the distance, at a spot that must have marked the crest of the victory pavilion of the old palace, the water was now still. In front of it, the slanting head of a tall, majestic pillar rose high. The small stone structures of the ramparts dotted the shore beneath as far as the eye could reach. A lone chariot that had escaped being shattered when the waves flung it down, lay leaning on its side, its yoke sunk in the sand. Thank you. Thanks. That's surprising for me as well. I don't even remember it. This way, but also because I've never read the English translation. I read it in the original mother tongue.

SPEAKER_02 22:05

Do you remember it being as descriptive and grand in a way?

SPEAKER_00 22:10

I think so. Yeah, I do think so. But it may not have been surprising for me because as I, you know, as I said earlier, it's um, I think our right of uh our style of writing, um, for many Indian writers, I don't want to make uh any kind of uh you know very general statement, but I think it's very common for us to be quite descriptive. And many of the Indian languages tend to use you know quite a lot of imagery. So any sentence will have an image. Uh, something like um, yeah, I think Amitava Kumar has this example in his essay on authenticity in Letters to a Writer of Color, where his aunt says that my nose you know looks like a beetle, or I can't remember exactly, but it was such a beautiful uh image. And I think that's how people typically speak. And then when we write in English, I think it tends to be we follow some of the syntax and some of the original um the ways in which we construct sentences in our mother tongues.

SPEAKER_02 23:21

Yeah, um, you're reminding me of something that Amit Chowdhury wrote somewhere uh to do with storytelling, and I'm trying to remember exactly what it was. Um I wish I I was a little bit cleverer. But he was saying something about how, you know, um just about the kind of direction of travel, you know, the sense in in which a lot of his stories weren't interested in um, you know, how a character developed, but with sitting with the character and describing their kind of experience at the time rather than this kind of sense that something has to be happening all the time, you know, that I think is a much more kind of common Western narrative. Um, in a sense, there's more of a kind of poetical um understanding or desire to express a sort of more poetical living. Um, I'm not giving him the correct credit, but uh, I think that chimes with what you're saying about an Indian approach.

SPEAKER_00 24:26

Yeah, I mean his um books, the ones that I've read, I think one of the most interesting aspects for me is that in many ways, even if the character is not moving through time and space as they might do in a typical novel, uh, we do get an understanding of what the world around them is like. So not just about them, but we do understand uh, you know, their situation in life, their circumstances, and what's happening around them, which is something that have that's always fascinated me about Amit Chaudhri's writing. Um, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:00

Yeah, I'm I'm I'm searching through my bookshelf in the way that uh I always find I do. And I found a little bit where he says, um, at one point he he's written this book uh called Against Storytelling, which is is another collected kind of um series of essays. And he he's written in the mission statement um fuck storytelling. Um and he says, he says, um part of the reason stories are important is because they contain a happening or happenings in a character's or a place's life. It also follows that the eventless can't be the proper subject of a narrative of a for a story. And so he's kind of saying, well, actually, the eventless can be the proper subject of a story, just not necessarily the one that's considered in a kind of Western um conception of how story works. So yeah. Um thank you so much for sharing that. And I hope people will be interested to go in and have a look at it. And I will be providing um some links to some of these works that you're mentioning. Um so, with all of that in mind, I would love to move on to your second book, um, which is The Adventures of Dennis by Viktor Dragonsky. And I it's amazing you've picked another of these like important kind of books to your childhood. Please tell me more about it.

SPEAKER_00 26:15

Because it was originally Russian, right? It is, it was Russian, yeah. And what a great name, Dragonsky. I think like any children's writer would love to have that name. Um, you know, I picked these two books that made me think I could be a writer. But with The Adventures of Dennis, it's a book I actually refer to when I was writing Jin Patrol on the Purple Line because it has a nine-year-old narrator named Jay. And Dennis, I think, is 10, if I'm not mistaken. And he is a child growing up in uh, you know, in what was then the Soviet Union, possibly in the 50s or 60s. That was never really clear to me when it was taking place because it seemed like a magical place anyway. Um so these uh, you know, um, I have to really explain that India and uh Russia had very strong ties uh for much of my childhood. And uh, you know, it was this relationship which had been cultivated over these ideals of socialism primarily, I think. And uh where I grew up, which was Kerala, it had a very socialist uh system of government. And so they really did encourage these very close ties with uh Russian culture. So it was not only, you know, the books that we had, but not only Chekhov and the other short story writers that uh that are who are popular in the West, like Tolstoy. Um, but also these uh, you know, um they would bring along these children's books. I remember there were people who would come to sell these books and they would just set it up, set up shop in the school playground, and then you could go and take a look at it during your break. Um, and this was one of the books that I think, you know, I really fought with my parents so that they would give me the money to buy this particular book. And it was so appealing to me because it has these really lovely illustrations, and that was what set the books from these translated books from Russian apart for a child, which was that it had these really, you know, excellent uh printing and these really lovely illustrations. Uh and I read the first page and you know, it's just immediately blown away. And in part, I think it's because you know, when you're raised in an Indian in Indian culture and Indian society, there are certain expectations about the kind of child that you will be that you know, you uh there are all these, most books came with some sort of morals. And even if you know you're reading, say in it blyton, those uh the children in those books, like Famous Five or Secret Seven, they may be naughty, but more or less they have an idea of what is okay to say and what one shouldn't say in society. And what I liked about Dennis is that immediately he's just a child and he's very honest. So he says that uh, you know, he likes playing games, but only if he wins. And then he says, uh, grown-ups ask such stupid questions. And you know, like for an Indian child, um, especially one like me, you could not say those things out aloud. Uh, and uh the fact that uh he could, and that it was quite honest in that sense to his experience was what I found most appealing to the book. But it's also just, you know, it's just a bunch of vignettes. There's no straightforward story going from A to B. So it's not like adventures of Dennis, and Dennis is going on an adventure, it's really his day-to-day life and what's happening in his life at school with his parents, um, and you know, really very small things like how his mother takes him to the park, but then she meets a friend, and then they end up talking to each other and they ignore him. So he doesn't like it. Um, so it's just essentially these very small vignettes of his of his life, um, and which were popular in India. You know, I realized uh later that there's an entire generation of Indians who grew up with these books, and there are actually, you know, Facebook groups about of people who are still, you know, they discuss these Russian books translated into various Indian languages and not just English. There are people who collect these books because, you know, it's nostalgic and they have this uh it's it's it's a book of, you know, often the definitive book of their childhood. Uh there was a children's magazine called Mishha, which I remember used to write stories and you know, draw these paintings and post it all the way to the Soviet Union or Russia. I don't know if it ever reached them. Um, but it it was there was this huge uh, yeah, they were hugely popular. Um, of course, it's only now that I understand part of it, you know, couched in between the pages is also some propaganda about um socialism and the Russian government. But as a child, I didn't really see that. I I think at some point Dennis says it's great to be in Russia because you don't have to pay anything if you have to go to the dentist and it's all free for everyone. So it just, you know, to a child, um, you know, as I was, it feels like a like a euphoria. Um, it's only later that you realize the reason why these books were popular and this exchange was there was because this was the way in which, you know, they were uh it was essentially propaganda for the Russian way of life. Uh, but the stories were so good and you know, the illustrations, they're so attractive that um I think even today I'm willing to forgive all that uh because it's just these books are so much fun. Um, I read uh online that the CIA, you know, they were keeping an eye on what the Russians were up to at that time, and they found that this was one of the ways in which uh Russians tried to spread their propaganda. Like they published something like uh 25 million books and they sent it around India. And that was a way in which you know they were um trying to promote or trying to show Indians that this is the Russian way of life. So just like you know, the Americans used Hollywood in many ways to present the American way of life as the right way to live. Um, for the Russians, it was, I think, through these books, which yeah, still popular apparently, according to all these Facebook groups, uh, and the people who are trying to find them.

SPEAKER_02 32:29

That is so interesting. And it's interesting that there's there's a Russian connection in a way between both of the, I mean, you're saying this influenced your your book, Gym Patrol on the Purple Line. But um also, I mean, there's the some of what was happening um in the last um in your in your other novel, The Last of Earth, is there's that the the the British are desperate to get into to bet because they're worried about the Russians. So it's interesting that there's this Russian connection. But but before we um before we go to that, I'm just gonna give a little quote and then I'm gonna ask you to tell me a bit more about how um how this influenced. I'm hoping, I'm hoping it's influenced Jolly, your character from Jim Patrol, because he's just got so much energy. But anyway, this is gonna actually mention one of the quotes that you said. So this is from the opening story that um things I like. I like to lie on my stomach slung over Daddy's knee with my arms and legs dangling like wash on a line. I like to play chess, checkers, and dominoes, but only if I win. If I don't, I don't. I like to listen to a beetle scratching inside a box. And on Sundays, I like to crawl into bed beside Daddy so we can talk about our dog. As soon as we move to a bigger apartment, we're going to buy a dog and train it and feed it, and it'll be a very intelligent and bouncy dog, and it'll steal lump sugar and I'll wipe up all its puddles and it'll follow me around like a devoted dog. So, I mean, even just in that small quote, I love I love the energy. So, yeah, I mean, please tell me more about how this sort of connected in your mind with with your first novel, Gym Patrol on the Purple Line.

SPEAKER_00 34:06

Um, mostly it's just uh, you know, getting Jay's voice right. And that was actually my primary concern before I started to write the book was that I needed a voice which could carry these very heavy subjects because it's a book about children disappearing, it's about you know child trafficking and kidnapping of children. It's it goes to very dark places, and I wanted a voice that could counter some of that heaviness, a voice that had some liberty. Um and I knew it could come from a child's voice, but I also needed the child to have um almost a blind faith in both himself and and the universe that things would eventually turn out okay. So I needed a very optimistic light voice. Um, and then when I was thinking about writing Jay, um, you know, I remembered Adventures of Dennis and all the other uh Russian children's books that I had read as a child, uh, most of them had these very uh, you know, these very bubbly young boys uh who would be the main narrators. And uh, you know, they had uh there was nothing to suggest um you know a great deal of intelligence. Um typically you see that when you have a child narrator, you know, the narrator is knows things which are far beyond his age. So they are essentially like a prodigy, and they uh it's that understanding that they have which takes them far beyond the ears that lets them be the main narrator. And what you see in the Russian children's books is that the children are just children, you know, there's nothing that makes them stand apart from anyone else. And that is not why you read that story, you don't read this story because the child is unique and the child is gifted. This child is just like everybody else. And for me, that was part of the appeal because I really wanted to write Jay as a child, just like anyone else. And this notion that, you know, children deserve to be saved or deserve to have a certain kind of life because they're gifted, I've always found that very troubling. So, and I wanted to say that, you know, this is just an ordinary boy, he's not very smart, he's you know, he has the intelligence of a nine-year-old. Um, and the way he sees the world may not always be correct, but that's just his point of view. And what these uh books taught me in these Russian um, you know, children's books, like Adventures of Dennis, is that you know, it was you could still have a book that people want to read and uh, you know, a character that people want to follow just by being ordinary and by allowing a child to be themselves, because children often have such a unique way of looking at the world. Um, you know, we talk about that whole Russian formalist concept of defamiliarization, which is that you look at an ordinary object and you describe it in a unique way, and which is what we try to do as writers all the time. But children kind of do that automatically because you know that's just how they view the world, and their frame of preferences can be completely different. Um, and you know, it's just what's interesting to them. So um I think these books really showed me how to do that. Um, and you know, I just want to spend time with Dennis, like he's he's just such a fun character. So um I was thinking of all that when I was writing Jay.

SPEAKER_02 37:33

That's absolutely, you know, fascinating because you're right that the subjects you're dealing with are very heavy and and difficult. You know, there are children going missing. Um, you're also looking at children who are living in in really impoverished conditions um and struggling just generally in their life. And Jay is so full of hope and joy and um energy. Um and I know for that book it kind of links back to you also um were a journalist um and you'd done a lot of of journalism around this area. Um so I'd love to know a bit more about you know how how that research came and kind of married itself with Jay.

SPEAKER_00 38:20

Um so I did have um you know a good understanding of what life was like in those impoverished settlements. I had interviewed a number of children for my stories, the stories that I wrote as a reporter. Uh so I knew what they were like. Um, and I also knew that most of them didn't see themselves as victims. So, you know, they had all that swagger, and um, they were interested in very specific things. So as a reporter, I would be there often writing about government policy and how it is failing these children. For instance, they should have been at school, and very clearly they were not at school. Um, so I would be writing about the failures of government policy, but they were not interested in discussing any of that with me. You know, they had very specific interests, usually TV, usually Hindi films, music. Um, so to engage them, I had to talk about those subjects. And uh, you know, that was often how I got them to talk to me was by discussing or raising all these issues or, you know, raising all these uh talking about TV shows, for instance. Um and I was um so when I was writing this book, um, when I was writing Jean Patrol, and um, you know, you have all these terrible things happening. And so there's one way in which I could have written that is to have written a crime novel or told the story from the perspective of an adult. But I just, you know, I didn't want to do any of that. And partly it was my experience of um having been a reporter and having walked through all those neighborhoods, and I wanted to convey that energy the children had and their refusal to look at themselves as victims. Um, you know, I'm not saying every child was like that. I did meet children who ended up becoming, say, addicts because the pressures of, you know, life without any form of support were really difficult for them. But a vast majority of these kids were just, you know, getting getting by, uh, just dealing with what is happening on that day and trying to have fun. Um, so, and especially as a child, that's what you're interested in. You're interested in the moment, you're not really thinking big picture or you know, what am I going to do 10 years down the line? So I found that, you know, the child narrator, I found having a child narrator really helped me add that levity that I wanted to the story. And I hope it also helped me, you know, show them as humans. The problem with uh, you know, often writing these kind of stories, which are quite dark, is that people only see the problems. So they don't really see Jay, they just see, oh, he's this poor child with absolutely nothing and who has this really awful life. And I wanted to show that's not how he looks at himself, you know, and even the act of him anointing himself, a detective who's going to solve these cases of uh children disappearing in his neighborhood, it's a way in which he's exerting his agency in a situation in which he really doesn't have any. So, yeah, I mean, um all the children's books that I read in many ways, because you know, if you look at any of these children's stories, often they have the child in a um in a difficult situation. They've moved away, or uh, you know, they're at they are at a new school or their parent parents are split up. And this is when we meet the narrator. And then the story that we are told is typically the narrator trying to make sense of you know this new life, but doing it in their own way, in which you know they remain true to who they who they are. Um, so I was thinking about children's books, definitely. Yes, I was writing Jay.

SPEAKER_02 42:03

That whole idea of um taking his perspective in a way that focuses on the moment and his lived experience rather than thinking about I guess a kind of um, like you said, you could have written a crime mystery, um, but you chose not to. So in a way, you've you've kind of chosen a different form for the story. You haven't chosen that traditional arc. And I wonder whether that also kind of privileges less, the kind of or makes us think about not so much um, you know, an achievement, an achieving an answer, achieving a, but actually just the kind of what are the daily realities um that people are living with. So yeah, I I mean I I think it's a very successful, it does very successfully all the things you're saying you want it to do. Um and then quite interestingly, your next book, which you picked, is like suddenly we're moving away now from um sort of books that influenced your childhood, um, one of which Indian, one Russian. Um, and we're kind of moving now to like a much more kind of traditional novel that you've you've picked as your next one. You've chosen Moby Dick by Herman Melville. And I'd love to know what made what made you choose this book.

SPEAKER_00 43:21

I had only read abridged versions of Moby Dick until quite recently. Um I started reading Moby Dick when I was writing The Last of Earth because I felt that um, you know, I was reading a lot of 19th century novels, and this was one of them. Um I I would say I was reading maybe three chapters a day. So it was not a book that I read cover to cover, sitting, you know, uh for three days in a row. Um it it's it's not a book that allows you to do that. You really have to spend time with the with the page, with the, you know, the sentences can be quite dense. So you do need more time with the text. And now I can't remember. I think it might have been, you know, of the many books that I read, this was one of them, but I loved it so much from the very beginning that I got a copy and then I was reading it day by day. And it's a book that I returned to often. So it is a conventional book in that it's a it's considered a classic. But if you read Moby Deck, you realize it's not conventional at all. And part of the reason it didn't do well when it came out, I think, is because it's it's not giving you a conventional narrative. You have all these sections about whales and you know information about paintings about whales, or um, it's it's such a such a digressive account. So in one way, you have this very clear narrative arc, which is here is this captain Ahab who is chasing this white whale named Moby Dick, and the narrator is Ishmael, who is on the ship with Ahab as the captain. Um, so the journey is essentially following them through the seas as they track or try to track this whale. But on the other hand, what is this book about? You know, it has all these digressions, it's these philosophical ruminations, it's uh it has biblical stories, it has Ahab, you know, doing these um essentially what are solukies or SI, it has chapters written like a script. Um, and it was such an important book for me to read as I was writing The Last of Earth, uh, because you know, The Last of Earth is an expiration novel, it's an adventure novel, and there are these expectations about the genre that you know you just move from conflict to conflict and you have all this uh high obtain action, almost like an Indiana Jones thriller. And what Moby Dick really showed me was that, you know, A, that is not how expiration typically is, and B, that it is okay as a writer to um have those digressions and have those ruminis and spend chapters, you know, have chapters in which you're just giving uh the reader details about whales and whaling industry and the type of knots that you use in ships, and um it's not in any way moving the story forward, but I think what that accretion of details in some ways it gives us a sense of what life must have been like for Ishmael on the ship, which I thought was powerful in its own way.

SPEAKER_02 46:30

Yeah, and it's famously a novel of obsession, isn't it? And I wonder whether, I mean, several of the characters in The Last of Earth have kind of obsessive ideas about what they're doing. You know, the captain, the English guy who's kind of trying to make his way to Tibet when it's forbidden and he's not allowed to go there, is obsessed with this idea of kind of doing that achievement and you know, um getting medals and things when he comes back from the geographical society. Um, and uh one of the people that he's there with, um, the Indian Balram, from whom those sections are written, his perspective, he's actually obsessed with with finding his um fellow worker, right? The guy that's also been employed by the British to kind of map out the way into Tibet. And he's gone missing, he's been captured, he's he's certain that he's alive. Uh so he's obsessed uh with getting him back in a really beautiful and um painful way. And then your other character, Catherine, yeah, she seems to be kind of um like many people I think who go exploring, there's this desire to find a self, really, isn't it? And it seems like this journey for her is a way of trying to figure out who she is in the wake of so many things. You know, she's lost her sister, um, she's she's left this husband behind, she's grappling with the idea of you know of her heritage in terms of you know how much of her is English, how much of her is Indian. Um, so there's all these things in like desire as well. I love the fact that you have this woman in her 50s, right? She in her 50s or her 40s?

SPEAKER_00 48:18

Yes, she's just done 50 as a best artist.

SPEAKER_02 48:21

So she's pretty much my age, and I love how into desire she is. Like so, you know, there's all this kind of this so there's a lot of people who have a lot of so much motivation, so much like, and I guess in a way, like doing these journeys, you need to have that behind you. Otherwise, why are you there? You know, what are you doing there? Um, so would do you think there's part of you know, the the famous kind of Ishmael um the famous Ahab and the whale, is that is that part of it too? Do you think do you think you were learning or taking some of that away from Moby Dick?

SPEAKER_00 48:57

Sure. When I started reading Moby Dick, and you know, in the very early passages, Ishmael says that at some point at some point he feels like um, you know, I'm paraphrasing this so badly. But he does say that, you know, he wants to punch people as he's walking down the street. Then he knows it's time for him to get on a ship because this daily life is too boring and dull. Um, essentially, that's what he's saying. Uh, this is such a such a terrible paraphrasing. My apologies to anybody listening.

SPEAKER_02 49:30

No, it's it's absolutely perfect. It's it's literally right there.

SPEAKER_00 49:34

I can see it in front of me, the first page. Yeah, it's such a beautiful sentence. And I just thought, yes, this is why so many of us want to travel. Um yeah, it he says it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people's hats off. Then I account it high time to get to see as soon as I can. And uh, you know, the minute the second I read it, I also knew this was one of the reasons why my characters want to travel as well, because I think the constraints of um regular society would have been too much for them. Uh, at least, you know, the people I was often thinking of this question, why do you want to travel? And what is making them climb these mountains? And part of it, I think, would have been uh, you know, this desire to get away from it all and to have, you know, be new versions of themselves away from home. Um, and that was certainly something I saw in Ishmael. Uh with Ahab, I think it's a kind of uh obsession that is harder to explain, um, but maybe something that the captain in my novel shares.

SPEAKER_02 50:49

Yeah, completely. Um, you got me excited there because actually, as you know, I'm a bit of a Gertrude Bell fan, and in one of her novels, one of her books of travel, she writes about um wanting to escape the bonds of of society. And so for her, this idea of travel is to kind of get a kind of freedom, um, which I think your character, Catherine, is is definitely to some extent exploring. Um, but yeah, also I find it fascinating how the beginning of Moby Dick, uh, you know, we all know that first line, right? It's a kind of line that people get, you know, when people talk about, oh, how do you draw people into a novel and so on? And the first line, call me Ishmael. Everyone knows that first line. But then actually, what you just quoted is only uh the third sentence of the novel. And I just think how interesting it is that it's quite a complicated, as you point out, it's a very complicated sentence that is like not what you expect when everyone says, Oh yes, call me Ishmael and that, you know. So I think it's wonderful that you've picked a book which maybe we've kind of it's become something that we've stopped thinking about in more depth. You know, it's become a kind of um sort of like stereotype rather than something that when we actually explore it more deeply has a lot more to tell us. So I'm really glad that yeah, we were able to explore that a little bit. Thanks so much for for bringing that up. Um, let's have a look at your fourth book. And um you have picked from Heaven Lake Travels Through Singkayang and Tibet by Vikram Seth. Um, and I had a little look at this book, and oh my gosh, I can totally see why you love this book. I was like, oh wow. Can you please read us a short section from chapter 10?

SPEAKER_00 52:44

13th August. By dawn we have descended the Tangula Range. When we reach the fort, we halt the truck and sleep for an hour or so. What a sudden change this is from the barrenness of King. Mist in well-formed strands moves across rich green hills, yaks feed everywhere. A bright river keeps us company. Six trucks with Tibetan drivers pass us going in the opposite direction. Tibetans, unlike hands, usually travel in convoys for company and Tibetan tea. Still, early in the morning, we drive into Andal.

SPEAKER_02 53:26

Thank you so much. So please tell me a bit more about this book and why you picked it.

SPEAKER_00 53:32

So I um came across this book when I was a teenager. I think it was published in maybe 1982 or something, and I you know came to it later. But um what I loved about the book was um his voice more than anything else. With travelogues, you find that they date very quickly, so which is why I say Lonely Planet has to keep reissuing Portugal, because the world changes very quickly. Um, and this is especially true of China, actually, because China changes like in a week. Um but with this book, because it's so much of himself is there on the page, and we're really seeing his experience and all the things that annoy him and all the things that he enjoys. Um, I think it's a book that has uh, you know, it hasn't dated. I read it when I was writing The Last of Uh maybe three or four years ago again, and I was very surprised by how engaging it still was, even though the world of Tibet has changed and you know, China has changed as well. Um and I think that's partly down to how personal to him the story is. So it's almost like reading, uh, you know, it's like Ishmael's account of the swaling expedition. Uh, in that sense, it's kind of timeless. Um so two things. One, I already loved Vikram Said as a writer by that time. Um, you know, I loved his poems. Uh so when I saw that uh he had written this book, I picked it up for that reason, um, not knowing what to expect. Um, I was interested in Tibet, like many people who grew up in India, because the Dalai Lama lives in India. We have a very clear idea about uh, you know, the Chinese occupation of Tibet and how the Tibetans, many Tibetans sought refuge in India. And uh, you know, there are Tibetan markets in many Indian cities and Tibetan settlements in many parts of India. So I was aware of that history and I was also interested in Buddhism and uh Tibetan Buddhism in particular. Um, so I wanted to read this book, hoping to just learn more about Tibet, but primarily because it was written by Vikram Said. Um what I realized later was that I'd never seen an Indian account of traveling through any part of the world. So the Indian, as uh, you know, we don't um I think we were more well known at that time, for sure, for our novels, um for fiction and maybe poetry. And this was the first time I'd seen an account which was say from, you know, from India. And the experience of an Indian in a country like uh Tibet is quite different because there are completely different cultural references and how the relationship between uh, you know, Asians can be quite different. And you don't essentially see that in many of these books because it's written by a Westerner and they are approaching a country without a full understanding of the culture, or maybe just you know, uh you have a very superficial understanding of the culture and the religion, but it's very different for someone like Vikram Said when you travel through, you know, Tibet, which borders India, um, you have a better, it's of course it's a completely different culture, but you do have some more understanding than you would see in a westerner. Um, and in fact, one of the most interesting parts of this book is that even at that time, travel through uh Tibet was very restricted. And uh the way in which he ends up getting a permit to travel to Lhasa is that you know he's uh he spends one evening at a campsite, or you know, it's they're around a fire. There are some Chinese people. He ends up singing this uh very famous Hindi song. Uh, it's a black and white film, so I don't know how it might have come out in the 50s or 60s, but that song is every person, you know, around the fire. They're all Chinese, but they know the song because uh, you know, this particular Hindi film and the actor was very popular in China at that time. Um, even though you know it was several years past uh his prime. He was probably um, in fact, he says he learns that this actor died when he's there. A Chinese official tells him, and he hadn't been following the news, he doesn't know the news because you know this was before the internet, and it's the Chinese official who tells him actually, this actor Raj Kapoor, uh, he died and it comes as news to Vikram Said. But he sings this Raj Kapoor song, very popular song, still well known. Um, and everybody starts singing along with him. And so when he goes and sees if we can get a permit to travel to Lhasa, uh the official, you know, is saying, Oh, there are so many rules, like I don't think so. But then because he remembers that he sang this song the previous night, he ends up giving him this permit to actually travel to Tibet, which is how this whole book happens. Um, so I for me, that part of you know, the this very cultural, the ways in which culture travels through these borders and the ways in which uh, you know, certain parts of culture may be popular in both countries. That was not something that I'd seen before and which I found quite interesting. And lastly, I'll say in, you know, which is actually quite in common with the other books that I mentioned, is that um it's not like he knows where he's going. It's he's just essentially hitchhiking. And so we are, you know, he's figuring out where he's going next based on whether he gets a permit, based on whether there's somebody who stops and picks him up and takes him on the truck along. So I found that interesting for a travel narrative as well, that he's going with no expectations and you know, he's just open to whatever's happening around him. Did he did he have a destination in mind? Um it's it's very vague. At some point, he decides he wants to go to Tibet and he wants to see the Potala Palace. And in fact, you know, he can't actually enter it because he doesn't have the requisite permits, but he ends up, I think he pretends to be somebody else and he ends up climbing the palace as well. Um, and he had a very vague idea about how to return to India, but then you know, the there are rains and the bridges are washed away. So it's actually really interesting just because we're following this man who doesn't know where he's going either. So, you know, it bucks all the traditional tropes of the travel narrator.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:04

It yeah, it sounds wonderful. And even just from my tiny little dips into it, um, I'm really spellbound by it. The writing is just it really draws you in and gives you a real sense of all of these different people he's traveling with. You know, they're all keen to tell him about their own culture, what matters to them, they change depending on where they are. You know, it's it's very appealing. Um and I can see how how it might have helped you think about that space in different ways. Um yeah, it's it's yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. Um and thinking about kind of some of the contrast between how people might perceive how Asians might perceive that part of the world in comparison to how the British are seeing that part of the world. Obviously, that comes across in The Last of Earth. Um, and you have all these different characters, and depending on which part of the border they're in, you know, the the the Chetak, your bandit, um, he's like, you know, he's he's on the run in India, but in Tibet, you know, he's kind of he's he's got the power. So I think it's really interesting the way that you're exploring the different dynamics of um, you know, who's perceived to be able to do certain things in certain places and who isn't, and how that shifts depending upon where they are and that changes across the story and their own kind of perceptions of themselves. Um, and it's interesting that's yeah, you're kind of saying that this book's sort of doing that a little bit as well, or helping you think about that. Um thank you. I want to move on to your last book because I'm conscious that we could probably talk all day. Uh, well, I would certainly quite like that. Um, so um, your final book that you chose is Um Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondacci, which is again quite a different book. Um, and I'd love to know why you've chosen this one.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:03

Um, I was thinking a lot about which I knew there would be an Ondacci book on my hypothetical bookshelf because he's been such a huge influence on me as a writer. I've reading his books was how you know I always wanted to write like him because he is a poet, and there's all these, you know, there's so much lyricism. His sentences are so beautiful, and um that's partly how I started reading him. And then, you know, he has all these um such interesting characters in his novels, uh, people you don't really typically see um or hear about. Uh so if you think about in the skin of a lion, you know, you have these people making these bridges that still stand in Toronto today, but we would never hear their stories if not for, you know, through his book. Um, and you have the character of um Kip in the English patient, who is an Indian mining, you know, he uh what is the word for it? He removes mines. Uh in Italy during the Second World War. Again, that's not a story that we had seen at that time. You know, we didn't even know that there were Indians fighting in the World War. It was not commonly known when the book came out. Um so I love all his books. I have all his works. Um, I picked Coming Through Slaughter because it's such an interesting uh book, and it's doing something with um, you know, in trying to present the story of um, you know, a cornet player named Buddy Balden. And uh it's assumed that Buddy was one of the pioneers of jazz. And the structure of the book in many ways imitates, you know, the format of jazz. Um, I am not an expert, um, but you know, if you were, I think that person would have a better, uh, better ability to really unpack how the book, the way in which it's written, it follows many of the, you know, the thematic structures or forms that you may see in jazz as well. Um, you know, what I always liked about Ondaji is that he doesn't, uh he's not in interested in conventional storytelling in any way. You have to, as a reader, piece together a lot of what's happening in his books, especially the later books like Divisadaro. You have these three different voices, and you know, you have temporally they're located in different uh eras, and then you have to kind of put everything together. And he does something similar in coming through slaughter. So it's essentially the story of this connect player named Buddy Balden. We have very little information about him, and this is um dajji trying to piece together his life. Um, and it's such a fascinating, you know, reconstruction of that story, and it alludes to everything that there are gaps, and this is what we may know, or this is imagination, and the writing suggests all that in these fragments, and you know, tonally do the fragments shift. So um it's not that you're having the same experience as you're reading, you know, page after page, and in some way that mimics, I guess, what you would get in jazz music, and that it just can be a completely different um sound suddenly, and you're not really prepared for that. And I'm interested in the ways in which you know writers use music uh in their writing, and they're inspired by music as well uh in how they construct stories.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:36

Are you inspired by music in your writing?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:40

I wish I could say yes, but I I don't know music well enough to do that. Um, I do, you know, I play music um as I'm writing. So when I was writing Jean Patrol on the Purple Line, I was listening to a lot of uh Hindi film songs because I felt, you know, my characters would be listening. To that. In some ways, their movements would be dictated by the beats of the song. So in writing Jay, and some of the, you know, there are brief chapters from the points of view of the other children who disappear. So I was thinking of what they would be listening to. And when I was writing The Last of Us, I was listening to a lot of Tibetan musicians. So in some ways, my hope is that it seeps into the rhythm of my sentences, but who knows if that's actually happening or not.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:29

I'm sure it does. One of the other things that you said when you're describing your interest and reasons for choosing the book is you say that there's not a lot of information. So he's kind of writing into the gaps. And it feels like particularly in The Last of Earth, you've had to do that, haven't you, for your for your Indian characters? You know, there's a lot of information about British travelers. There's not so much information about what the people that were helping them kind of do these amazing journeys. Um, it's not so much information from them. So can you tell me a little bit about how you navigated that kind of kind of finding their stories?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:08

It was partly through research. Um, a number of uh Indian historians, especially the subaltern studies historians, who were a group very active in the 80s, they wrote a lot about their methodology, about how you can construct the Indian consciousness from scraps. So I read a lot of their work and I try to follow successfully or unsuccessfully their uh, you know, their methods in trying to um understand the Indian experience uh from these dispatches, which are essentially written by British officials. Um, you know, one of the suggestions that uh Subaltern Studies historian had was that you can often attribute the inverse value that a British official has given an Indian. And he has this example, which is um, you know, some sort of memo that a British official has sent to um, I can't remember to whom, but I'm guessing to an administrative office, about a particular uprising that had occurred in his district. And so these were Indians, uh, you know, farmers who had come together uh to protest against certain uh British policies which often supported the landlords and left, you know, the peasants as they were called with very little for themselves. And that was part of the reason why there were so many famines, you know, during different parts of British rule. So um when the British official is writing about these people who had protested, they say, you know, they rose, it was like an epidemic, it spread across the region, or they'll say it was like an earthquake or lightning, it was so unexpected. So these kinds of words that the British use to describe uh the protest by the Indians, it can often suggest, you know, what it does is it minimizes the struggle or you know, the protest, because it's saying it was not planned, it was just some people coming together, and then suddenly, you know, they're like mad men. So what the historian suggests is you know, we actually have to look at it differently and we have to see that this was a planned uh, you know, people had actually got together, and you know, it's often because they call these people insurgents and fanatics. We can, you know, what is the antonym for those words? And that's one way in which we can understand what was actually happening. So I used some of those techniques because the British officials would often say that, you know, some Indians they would turn back from uh say the border at Tibet because they felt that they were close to being discovered. And if the Tibetans discovered that they were spying for the British, you know, they often either they kill them or uh it would have been they would have been put in prison. So they turned back and the British official would write, they didn't have sufficient uh uh, you know, they were covered. And so then I had to read that and try and understand was that really, was that really because they were covered? So because did they understand in that moment that they would now be, you know, they were in grave danger. And so the only option for them was to turn back. So these methodologies were something that I, you know, I used when I was writing. Uh, the other thing was uh, you know, Hilary Mantle says this in her BBC Raith lectures. She says that uh she had to get the characters, you know, the rule that she had for herself was that the wallpaper in a character's room had to be accurate, but the characters' interiority she could rely on completely on her imagination. And as far as possible, I tried to follow those rules. So the kind of equipment that they would have, my characters would have had, what they would have been eating, what they would wear. I tried as much as possible to discover that through research. But when it came to their imaginations and their motivations, ambitions, you know, I allowed myself, I gave myself permission to write what I wanted.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:20

That's wonderful. Yeah. And you definitely have. I I fully in the heads of all of the characters you showed to me. I mean, I, you know, I believe them so wholeheartedly, and I feel I feel their emotions in the moments they find themselves. And you're you're very good at doing it, doing all of the different characters. Um, I mean, even even the English ones, you know, feel very real. So I was gonna also ask, because in in your choosing of this book, you also um today you talk again about kind of the different forms that this book has. And I and I wonder I would love you to talk about your epilogue in The Last of Earth, which to me seems to kind of in a way, I reached the end of the book before the epilogue, and I was like, but there's so much I want to know. And um, I kind of felt like this is just such a good way of dealing with that. You know, the the there is this kind of Western, as we've already discussed, this desire to kind of like reach the tense point and find the ending and kind of get to the mountain, you know, all that kind of sense of kind of reaching the end of a journey. And in a way, you kind of hold that back from us. Um and was that in your mind when you wrote the epilogue?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:39

I didn't even want to write the epilogue, to be honest. Um, but I forced myself to in some ways. Um, and I'm glad I did. I think, you know, it is um, I hate these notions that many readers have that, you know, they should have some closure at the end of the book. Um, and I'm not that sort of, you know, I'm not that sort of reader. So my writing tends to speak to how I am as a reader as well. And because so many of these books that I loved and I grew up reading, they don't really give you uh a proper ending. Uh, there's often, you know, it's quite ambiguous. And as a reader, you can imagine the kind of ending that these characters may have. And, you know, for me, that's part of the appeal of uh creating these characters and following them. You know, as a reader, you should be able to imagine what happens next. Um with you know, when I when Jin Patrol on the Purple Line came out, um, I did have many people who wrote to me, readers from, you know, mostly the states, who said that they were unhappy about the fact that it didn't have, uh, you know, this is not a spoiler alert, but it doesn't give you, it has some answers, but doesn't answer every question. And they were upset about that. So I was thinking about that when I reached the last chapters of The Last of Earth, because I was wondering, am I again going to end the book without giving any kind of real closure? Um, but there were two things. One was that I felt uh, you know, I wanted a stronger suggestion of what might happen to them going forward, which I couldn't do if I just stopped without the epilogue. And I think what the epilogue gave me was um, you know, it is a brief, um, it's just a few weeks after the chapter's end, but that's sufficient time for them to have processed or have understood or made some sense of you know what had happened to them. And uh yeah, so that's why I included it. Um and primarily for you know for Catherine, uh I wanted to show that she had an understanding or that she had a better understanding of what it really means to practice Buddhism and the ideas of you know impermanence and detachment. Um, because you know, we are reaching this point with her notebooks and where the notebooks are. That seems to be, you know, that's one of the main questions Theopolog addresses. Um, and in fact, when the book, you know, um my um, I think when my agents read the book, they did say um ask me something about her journals and how was it going to address that question, but I didn't want to give any answers. Um and partly I feel that is how life really is, isn't it? And that so many things are unresolved, you don't have definite answers, and you have to be able to live without uncertainty. So I like putting my characters in those positions as well.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:50

Brilliant answer, and completely agree. Um yeah, and I and I love the way that it it allows you to have both the best of both worlds by having an epilogue. You know, you've kind of given the story in a way without concluding lots of things, and then you've hinted at some possible kind of like resolutions to some extent, but they're but because they're an afterward, you know, there's that sense in which you're pushing against that form, which I think for me was like I was very excited by that. Um, so uh just uh one last question, which is kind of slightly um, you know, silly one, I guess. Um if you had to pick one of these books, um if we were imagining that this shelf was like you only allow one book on your shelf, which one would you pick?

SPEAKER_00 1:16:36

I think I would pick Morbidek just because it's so complex and layered, and every time I read it, I find something new in it. Um and yeah, so if I had only one text or if I was on a desert island, I think this book, yeah, I would never be bored of Morbidek.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:55

Thank you so much, Deeper, and thank you so much for sharing um all of your hypothetical bookshelf books and for talking about your own work and your writing. I really want to thank you so much for coming, and I really encourage everybody to go and read all of your books. And um thank you very much for for being here.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:14

Thank you for having me.