'The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty' by Vendela Vida

This is an easy book to recommend as it is successful is a number of different ways: firstly, it is engaging and enjoyable to read, well-paced and with the protagonist’s back-story gradually emerging in synchronicity with the plot; secondly, it is thought-provoking in its examination of the phenomenon of identity, something that belongs more to the world that surrounds an individual than to the individual to whom the identity is applied, something that brings its expectations and defining history, both of which are slippery enough to be shrugged off and exchanged if circumstances demand or allow; thirdly, it is written throughout in the second person, an affect that is elsewhere rarely successful but here is perfectly natural and compelling, making the reader entirely complicit in the elusions and deceptions of protagonist.

February 2016