I did an interview with writer Kirsty Fox recently. Due to some technical difficulties, the recorded interview is pretty much indecipherable, so I’ll just tell you a bit about the book, which is available both as an ebook and a physical book from Amazon and elsewhere. It’s a near future, post-modern, apocalyptic and very British book. I highly recommend it. It’s called Dogtooth Chronicals. (Yes, it’s spelled that way on purpose.)
Here’s a teaser video for the book. This character is the one non-British character in the book. Very interesting, a bit mad.
Perhaps the most telling thing I can say about it is hat I read it four times, always finding some new nuance to the story or writing, or falling for one of the characters even harder than I did the first time. It’s a long book and I’m an impatient reader, so this is quite something. I feel very lucky to have stumbled onto this novel. I think anyone who wants to understand the mind of young Britain should read it. It’s also quite entertaining.
The book’s unique aspects are that it’s written in from the viewpoints of seven different characters and it includes their particular dialects — northern England, Scottish, and in one case, the English as a second language of a German character. She thought the apocalypse out pretty thoroughly. You might question the cause of the apocalypse, but if you remember that it’s being explained by lay people who are cut off from most ‘scientific’ explanations, it doesn’t need to be perfect, would, in fact, be unlikely to be perfect.
I recommended to Ms. Fox that she try to get it published traditionally, but she felt that due to it’s timely nature, it would languish in the publishing process past its moment. She may be right about that. Traditional publishing moves slowly.
