Fiction

Nadia

Nadia moves between the competing perspectives of two survivors of the 1990s Balkan Wars who have escaped to London, only to discover that the war has followed them there. Nadia is a young refugee who just wants to forget the past—until Iggy starts temping at her London office. Afraid he may be a sniper from the war she fled, Nadia starts seeing threats everywhere, alongside unsettling visions of her lost girlfriend, Sanja. As her volatile connection with Iggy unravels, Nadia is forced to face the ethically shaky choices she made to escape the war, her survivor guilt, and her disavowed queer sexuality.

Christine Evans's novel takes us to the recent past of a war that broke apart a European country and that presciently foreshadowed the rise of ethno-nationalism in the West. Tense, suspenseful, and mordantly funny, Nadia tracks the complex ways in which a past marked by political violence can shadow and disrupt the present.

Cloudless

It’s a still, hot summer in Perth, heat shimmering off the city’s glass buildings. Not much to do but surrender to the cool of Beatty Park’s swimming pool. The locals are out in force: teenagers flirting, even the rag-tag kids from the refuge.

But something is moving amid all the stillness--a hidden snake sliding through shadows. It’s moving through lives and connecting them with its sonar trembles: Auntie, in town with Jerome to find the kid’s runaway mum; Kevin, tired of his bus route, dealing with raucous kids and bottlenecks and a city that seems to be growing hostile; Karri and his other-worldly sister Bat Girl; Jackie and her sisters, sharing smokes by the pool.

In this exquisite, lyrical verse novel by acclaimed playwright Christine Evans, we are invited to witness the strange and invisible ways people are drawn together and pulled apart—and flung towards the catastrophic release that might return them home.