This Paradise

Longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2020

Between gunshots there’s near-silence, just the waves shushing onto shore, the odd gull out by the reef. Hot air stirs the spindly pines. Cross-legged on the sand in the casuarina shade, Cara knocks a fire ant off her leg. The sun’s a grill today: there’s no cloud, no sign, yet, of the forecast tropical storm…

A family prepares for Assessment; an au pair in the Caribbean wrestles with duty as a hurricane makes landfall; a game designer aches with bodily longing. Amidst it all, twins, heroines, mothers and rebels play out their lives under the strange grips of technology, governments, corporations and the capricious planet on which we all, in our different ways, just about manage to live.

This Paradise is a rare and beautiful collection of stories about people fleeing towards places or times or situations they hope might be better – trying to outrun their nature, to deny the undeniable. Written with an arresting eye for detail, a rich sense of compassion and a darkly comic understanding of the human psyche, the stories in this volume propose a series of haphazard questions, not least of which is: where do we run to when there’s nowhere left to run?