READING ROOM: the latest books and a Great Read from Lucy Treloar
by Picador On sale August 27
There’s a beguiling, slow pace to Lucy Treloar’s extraordinary new novel. The ebb and flow of the plot and almost clandestine character revelations seem utterly in tune with the landscape, which in turn is slipping into the sea. But there’s also a shocking grittiness here, exposing malice and a world that has become unhinged.
Kitty Hawke is the last resident of Wolfe Island, which like other islands in Chesapeake Bay, is disappearing. Here she lives alone, a sculptor or “assembler” as she calls herself, working in her “makings room” with items foraged from the island or washed up from the sea. Her only companion is her Wolfdog, Girl, and the ghosts of her past. Then, one day she spots a skiff on the water, kids displaying reckless ignorance out in squally weather, she thinks. But the girl, Cat, can handle the boat and with her are two teenage lads, Josh and Luis, and a small girl, Alejandra.
Cat, it turns out, is her granddaughter and soon, Kitty realises, needs refuge. “Don’t talk about us to anyone … Silence is safety,” says Cat.
Kitty settles them into a vacant house after she has cooked them a warming meal, and as these newcomers stare out at the ghost town all around, Kitty is reminded of her childhood on the island when there were summer festivals and parties which seemed like a fairytale now. Then houses fell into the sea, schools were shut and relocation packages took people away.
Lucy Treloar’s evocative prose sweeps you up into the landscape as it erodes in front of our eyes. It is a metaphor of sorts for a society that is also at breaking point, and tensions build as the plot hurtles headlong into issues of illegal immigration, desperate refugees and family breakdown.
“The idea for Wolfe Island started with a photograph of the last house standing on the remnant of an island in the Chesapeake Bay. I knew instantly that it was my next book. I imagined a woman living there alone, and everything developed from there … Kitty is fierce and uncompromising, like a cowboy or knight of old,” says Lucy. “She is also in some ways an oracle of an imagined future, standing against crumbling social order, and revealing the ways people might behave when societies and worlds break down.”