Christy Edwall | Granta Magazine

Christy Edwall

Christy Edwall was born in South Africa in 1985. She has a doctorate in English Literature from Oxford, and her writing has appeared in Granta, Stinging Fly, the Southern Review, and the Times Literary Supplement. She lives in Brighton. History Keeps Me Awake at Night is her first novel.

Publications

History Keeps Me Awake at Night

Christy Edwall

Margit is at the point in life when things should have cohered. She’s married, she’s got a degree, she’s got friends who throw good parties, and yet she’s still adrift, moving from one precarious job to the next. One day, a picture of some Mexican students catches her eye in a newspaper. The group of 43 had been ambushed by police in 2014 while travelling on a bus and disappeared without a trace. And so begins Margit’s obsession with the ‘desaparecidos’. As she heads off down the rabbit holes and cul-de-sacs of Google Maps, her idiosyncratic quest to uncover the truth of what happened begins to eclipse pretty much everything else.

From a sharp and singular new literary voice, this is a novel that captures the texture of life in a frictionless city with drop-pin accuracy, while asking: is it possible to recover what is lost without losing oneself?