BOOKS
For the latest news, listings and reviews, go to list.co.uk /books
THE GRACEKEEPERS Glasgow author Kirsty Logan’s fi rst novel is on the way
Last year, ex-List books editor Kirsty Logan’s first short story collection, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales, came out to critical acclaim. May sees the release of her first novel, The Gracekeepers. It follows North, a performer in a circus that travels a world that’s been flooded, and Callanish, a ‘gracekeeper’ who officiates funeral rituals. ‘I wrote the book a few years after my dad died very suddenly at the age of 58,’ Logan explains. ‘One afternoon I was out on a boat with my uncle, and on the water I saw floating lights in cages. They looked like birdcages, and I started to wonder why there would be birdcages at sea. An idea popped into my head
about graces – birds used as grave markers whose death marks the end of mourning – and the whole novel began from there.’ It’s a setting that resonates strongly with
Logan. ‘What I really want in life – and what I want to think about in my fiction – is a mixture of the circus and the sea,’ she says. ‘I want the melodramatic, the surreal, the grotesque; glitter and roaring tigers and acrobatic tricks. But I also want distance and space, the edges of an island, stormy seas.’ (Yasmin Sulaiman) ■ The Gracekeepers is published by Harvill Secker on Thu 7 May. Catch Kirsty Logan and Lucy Ribchester at Aye Write!, Mitchell Library, Glasgow, Sat 25 Apr.
68 THE LIST 2 Apr–4 Jun 2015