This was recommended by Helen Evans for its similarities with my novel in progress. Travelling in a Strange Land is also challenging. The intensity of the first-person monologue—there are no chapter breaks—is akin to the winter storm that shapes the novel's action. The meteorological challenge (driving through an unfamiliar landscape covered in snow and accompanied by a blizzard) serves as a metaphor for the narrator's own frame of mind. We learn he has suffered from depression. He worries whether he is a good parent and he carries the burden of the elusive Daniel. We gradually—and shockingly—learn about Daniel's descent from drugs to death (alone, from heart failure). Daniel, it is revealed, is Tom, the narrator's first son. Tom asks the inevitable questions of could or should he have done more, or just things differently that might have prevented his son's death. The prospect of redemption (Tom is reuniting with his second son) emerges at the novel's end. However, the lasting image is of parenting as an emotionally challenging terrain. We all remain travellers in a strange land.
By David Park