Mireille Dushaw

So...

So this feeling of being a parent or having loved ones and not knowing what the future holds for them and being told that the future is disastrous, that is the emotional weather that she's interested in.

I think she's a brilliant stylist.

She just knows how to whittle something down till it's absolutely perfectly framed.

And part of what works so well in her novel is the way she juxtaposes these vignettes.

And don't be mistaken, even though she's not working with a kind of driving plot, there's a lot happening here.

And it is linear.

We are moving forward in chronological time.

The book's divided into six parts and things change.

In the middle of the book, I think roughly in the middle, is when Trump's elected.

And he's never named, but the sort of shift in the mood is really evident after that takes place.

Yeah, the wit is really central to this book, I think, because otherwise we'd just be drowning in a sea of...

pretty, you know, of despair because what she's documenting is despair, but she does it with such irreverence and she's interested in the unusual and she can find humour in a lot of situations that might otherwise be quite grim.

And what is his moral or ethical approach to his business, given that he's trading in, you know, material that came from genocide?

Is that approached in the novel?

She's had enough, Luke.