AFTERSHOCKS

AN WILSON

Atlantic, 275pp, £16.99, Oldie price £13.02 inc p&p

AN Wilson’s first lesbian novel is set in a city called Aberdeen on an imaginary island in the South Pacific with a colonial history and an Anglican communion. An earthquake – readers are invited to imagine something like the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2011 – destroys the cathedral and renders untenable the double life of its female dean Eleanor, and her alter ego Digby, an academic teaching a course on Greek tragedy. Events are seen through the eyes of a young actress, Ingrid, in love with Eleanor. In the

Spectator Brian Martin found Ingrid’s storytelling ‘enigmatic’ but not in a damning way – ‘There is a trick; but it’s ingenious rather than silly.’ Allan Massie in the Scotsman described the novel as ‘intelligent, amusing and yet disturbing’ and praised Wilson’s ability to be ‘serious without being solemn’ while fearing that ‘stern critics’ would ignore the book on account of its ‘wonderful’ readability. He compared it favourably to Muriel Spark’s exploration of an all-powerful God and the existence of suffering in The

Only Problem, and suggested that the seemingly random switch from Ingrid’s voice to an omniscient third person narrator might offend some high-brow critics but was unlikely to trouble most readers.