Nicole Abadie

Correct, yes.

She's trying to find her purpose, as everyone is at that age.

So, yeah, she's taken up teaching English and these passages, like you say, are absolutely... These are some of my favourite sections of the book, actually, where she's sort of introspectively talking about language and the way the English language is so complicated, I suppose, if that's the right word.

And it's sort of... I feel like in some ways it's almost reflective of her mental state in terms of she's trying to find her place and...

trying to teach English to these young children and trying to explain the rules that seem like they're completely sifting.

It's almost like the sand is constantly sifting, such as the reality of learning English.

I feel like that's almost an analogue for Ava and her trying to find her place in Hong Kong and finding her place as a person.

Edith is a young lawyer and immediately compared to the clinically detached Julian, she's far sweeter and more sincere.

She seems to know who she is and is quite happy to present her true self.

I found when compared to Julian, who's the other person fighting for Ava's sort of emotions.

It's not, no.

And I think as we read throughout the novel, she's prone to a lot of self-sabotage too, always questioning her emotions and her feelings.

And that's right.

I think that's where a lot of the suspense, if you like, comes from in terms of we don't know whether she's going to pick the right person or who we perceive to be the right person because we just don't know if we can trust Ava to see what's best for her.

It's also effortless, I found, as you say, just the way she writes about all of these things.

It's just, it feels like she's not trying to speak to all these things, but she just somehow does it in such a minute page count.

It's incredible.

So this is a novel whose magnitude is sort of measured in the precise smaller moments.

It sort of eschews a traditional narrative structure because it casts the reader into the mind of an unnamed protagonist and sort of exposes us to the complexities of his life, which is sort of noteworthy for its ordinariness and sort of...

lack of anything's going on, really, sort of his inner state of total paralytic physical and emotional indolence, I suppose.