Evidence – Author’s Comments

While writing Evidence I was motivated by the fascination that many people share for things ‘foreign’. I also wanted to cloak my narrative in mystery and uncertainty. Not mystery in the conventional sense of What happens next? But something more along the lines of Who are these people and why are they doing these things? My favourite books have always been those that persuade the reader to turn the page, not because of a plot-driven story line, but because the world the author has created is so odd and so compelling — that is, familiar while at the same time utterly outside our experience — that the reader cannot pull him- or herself away until the final page. In works of this nature the world in which the action takes place becomes a puzzle that the reader is trying to solve. These books can be disorienting or even disturbing, but the best of them leave an indelible impression. Something else I was thinking of while I was writing is the sort of elemental sketch that with a few simple lines suggests a shape or figure, and yet when we look at it our mind transforms the lines into a complete picture. I deliberately stripped the narrative of detail in order to provide the reader’s imagination with an opportunity to fill in the blanks.