Cassie McCullagh

So some of them are very short and vignette-like and others contain very detailed stories.

The one that I haven't been able to stop thinking about is called Sweet on the Tongue.

Can you explain that one?

So the woman at the centre of it has travelled from, she lives in America, she's travelled to Haiti with her husband and she's kidnapped and brutally raped, which you don't quite realise at first.

And then some members of her family don't know that it's happened.

and she has a child, but it's not told as straightforwardly as that, is it?

Which is part of the power of reading it.

I was going to say pleasure, but that's not the right word, is it?

And part of that remembering body, as you call it, is that there's literally sugar.

I mean, there were piles and piles of sugar in a warehouse and

And of course, in that context, the whole history of sugar is something that you can't help but think about with its connections to slavery and so on.

But she can taste and feel the sugar.

It's not just on her tongue.

It's sort of stuck into her skin.

And if people don't know anything about Roxane Gay as a writer and an activist and a feminist, part of her story is that she was herself gang raped as quite a young woman.

I mean, she was still a child, essentially.

And so she keeps on revisiting that and writing about what rape and trauma and sexuality, all of that, what that means.

And so approaching that in fiction is a really interesting thing to do, I think.

Roxane Gay's Aiti is published by Hachette.

Now, Roxane Gay calls herself a Haitian-American.