Author(s): Natasha Soobramanien, Luke Williams

Novel | Fitzcarraldo Editions

WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2022
A collaborative fiction about grief, friendship, and how to tell stories that are not yours to tell.

Edinburgh, 2014: N. and L., two writer friends arrive from London, a city they believe killed L.'s brother. Every day they try to get to the library to write their blocks, but every day they get distracted, bickering over everything from whether or not it's going to rain, to their Bitcoin tanking, trying and failing to resist the sadness which follows them as they drift around the city.

It's on a day like this that they make a new friend, Diego. They go out drinking and swap stories. Diego tells them he is named after his mother's island in the Indian Ocean, part of the Chagos Archipelago, which she and her community were forced to leave by armed soldiers in 1973. The writers become obsessed with this shameful episode in British history and the continuing exile of the Chagossian people.

Angry and sad and funny, this collaborative fiction set in Edinburgh, London and Brussels is about grief and friendship, and about trying to work out how, as a writer, you share a story that needs to be heard if it is not your story to tell.

But ultimately this is a novel about the true fact of a collaborative fiction authored by the US and British governments, created to maintain military power and to dispossess a people of their homeland.

Review:
'As an experiment in "fictive criticism", this is a new type of social novel, one that avoids stable conclusions. Instead it demands the reader's own critique.'
- Gurnaik Johal, TLS

'Intimate yet expansive, heartbroken but unbowed, and a book about writing that is anything but solipsistic, it's a stirring novel that lights a way forward for politically conscious fiction.'
- Anthony Cummins, Observer

'Focusing on the ongoing atrocity of the Anglo-American occupation of the Chagos Islands and displacement of their native people, Diego Garcia is a subtle contemplation of the uses of fiction and narrative (for good and bad) and how, where and why individual and collective narratives meet. Taking in artists from Kader Attia to Sophie Podolski, as well as depictions of the Chagossians in poetry, documentaries and essay films, it is a moving study of friendship, allyship and creative forms of political struggle.'
- Juliet Jacques, author of Trans: A Memoir

'This thought-provoking, brilliant book sends a hypersensitive probe into the subduction zone between solidarity and exploitation.'
- Nell Zink, author of Avalon

'Diego Garcia is an important and highly original work, incredibly well-researched and thought-through.'
- Philippe Sands, author of The Last Colony

'Diego Garcia is a beautiful, poignant, anarchic experiment in collaboration and collectivity. This novel does wonderful, innovative things to form and to politics - to style, to voice, to creolization, to propaganda and power and archipelic thinking - and especially to the denials inbuilt to British novels and British politics. Somehow it finds a way of exposing Britain's ongoing shameful occupation of the Chagos Islands while also being a document of literary resistance and originality. It offers models for future thinking.'
- Adam Thirlwell, author of Lurid and Cute

'As affecting as it is intellectually agile, Diego Garcia achieves what few novels even aim at - it opens up fresh ways of reading both history and fiction.'
- Pankaj Mishra, author of Run and Hide

'Through the intricately woven histories and the corresponding fictions within fictions, the compassion expressed in Diego Garcia highlights the absence of it in those who, forsaking their obligations towards other human beings, exiled the Chagossians from their home. Written in a language at once distant and interior, dazzling, we see that until the Chagossian people are home, nobody is home.'
- Vanessa Onwuemezi, author of Dark Neighbourhood

'Listless and urgent, dulled by sadness and yet dancing with anger, moments of unexpected beauty and strange, bright comedy - in Diego Garcia, these tensions are held together by the energy of a singular collaboration, where the interplay between fundamental separation and common cause is staged even at the level of page layout, the writing of the sentences themselves. It is a novel of shared and unshared experience that is wholly unapologetic about not knowing how such a thing is to be written, but risking it nevertheless. The result is compelling, challenging, unprecedented, essential.'
- Kate Briggs, author of This Little Art

Author Biography: Natasha Soobramanien, British-Mauritian, and Luke Williams, Scottish, are the authors of Genie and Paul and The Echo Chamber, respectively. They used to live in Edinburgh but at the time of writing live in Brussels, across the park from one another, where they meet up every day for a walk.