TASHA SURI

Mythical country: the fantasy writer tells us about her new novel

- Words by Jonathan Wright

THERE ARE NARRATIVES THAT SEEM TO be easily incorporated into our shared national story, and others that are just as easily excluded. Before she came to write her remarkable new standalone fantasy The Isle In The Silver Sea, a book set in an alternate Britain where stories have supernatural power, this process of selection had come to preoccupy Tasha Suri. “What are the stories that we value as defining Britishness?” Suri says as she explains the kinds of questions she was asking. “And which are the stories that we cast aside? Why do we talk about dukes and ladies and never talk about molly houses, for example, when we talk about the Georgian era?”

In our current febrile moment, a time of nationalistic rhetoric, these questions seem especially acute, as Suri herself is only too aware. “I think there’s a very strong movement in this country to want to love and value national identity,” she says, “which is not something I’m inherently against, but often that love and valuing requires the erasure of things that were less pleasant about our national identity.”

In contrast,