A compelling blend of historical mystery and literary fiction

In her debut novel, Kirsten Menger-Anderson explores who gets remembered in history through a compelling blend of historical mystery and literary fiction.

- Dave Chua

century, Prof Quinn, the first woman to hold the professorship of ancient history at the University of Cambridge, admits that she has had to train herself out of civilisational thinking. Her thesis has sent some readers grappling for an alternative way to view the world. But the point is not to replace "civilisations" with a more acceptable word, she says. Instead, one should regard it as a shift of focus away from boundaries between cultures to the links between them. She compares this with the way people are conditioned to view maps.

"There's a really culturally ingrained impulse to look at the land masses, and the sea will just be black or blue and sort of irrelevant. Of course, historically before aeroplanes, the sea is more important two port cities will be closer together in terms of travel and social life than one of the ports and somewhere inland."

It is a counterintuitive practice that she says should get easier with time. "It's fun to keep reminding myself to reverse the ways that we're all taught to think and realise how historically contingent they are."

Another way Prof Quinn is challenging conventional thinking is in paying more attention to the agency of cultures that adopt alien practices, instead of understanding cultural flow as a diffusion from a place of "high" to "low" culture, typically thought of as from the West to the East.

Again, there is contemporary importance in forcing this conceptual shift. She references the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, in which there is a belief that Islamic immigrants might want to empty Europe and fill it instead with Islamic values.

"The thing is, even if that was the plan, it wouldn't be possible. That's not how people manage the exchange of ideas. The moment of contact always creates something new, something exciting. This is really important in a world where there are bad actors whipping up fear and insecurity."