History Keeps Me Awake at Night

Flickering between virtual Mexico and actual London, this smart, funny novel follows a woman who is losing herself in the search for what is missing.

Margit is at the point in life when things should have cohered. She's married, she's got a degree, she's got friends who throw good parties, and yet she's still adrift, moving from one precarious job to the next. One day, a picture of some Mexican students catches her eye in a newspaper. The group of 43 had been ambushed by police in 2014 while travelling on a bus and disappeared without a trace. And so begins Margit's obsession with the 'desaparecidos'. As she heads off down the rabbit holes and cul-de-sacs of Google Maps, her idiosyncratic quest to uncover the truth of what happened begins to eclipse pretty much everything else.

From a sharp and singular new literary voice, this is a novel that captures the texture of life in a frictionless city with drop-pin accuracy, while asking: is it possible to recover what is lost without losing oneself?