David Hunt

So we have an explosion, a group of people who one of the characters imagines...

This woman is on top of a building watching another building explode with a group of people who are sipping white wine.

He wasn't there.

This is how he pictures it.

And then you get the interweaving stories of the three protagonists in the book where you see their lives intersect in an American college town and they intersect in...

In a disastrous way, each one of the characters is trying to deal with loss and to fill the void that they have at the centre of their own being because they've lost something.

And it's a wonderful, wonderful story about the emptiness of loss and how things crawl in to fill the space that is left by loss.

I found it spine-tingling.

I think Phoebe's at the centre of it.

And she's the one who's hardest to get a handle on as a character.

She's born in Korea but comes to America as a very young child.

Her name was Hyejin in Korean.

And she does a first-person retelling of her story, but at times she breaks into a third-person voice talking about Hyejin as if she's this disassociated person with two separate characters, the Korean and the American.

And she suffers from two extreme losses.

One is a loss of her great love of music and one is a loss of her mother.

And she attempts to fill the void left by these two things that were the centre of her life through a sort of nihilistic sex and drugs and the ephemera of life and almost like a psychic vampire situation.

trying to get close to other people who are miserable so she can feed off their misery and in some way have that fill the void that's at the centre of her.

She's a really interesting sort of psychological character in terms of the exploration of what it is to have lost.

Covered in thick skin and dirt, yeah.

It's very precise.