The Others

'This is a multi layered story of love, of life under a suppressive regime, of different cultures meeting, of fear, joy and the consequence of secrets. The story that Kalayil has written seeps into your heart and steals a little of it away.' @LBRBsBlogs

'Each inhabits those years of young adulthood during which the sweeping internal dramas of one’s own emotions can feel bigger than history, bigger than the world. Nonetheless, each is caught in the web of state surveillance whose imperceptible threads they are required to negotiate; threads which tug on their self-consciousness, unravelling it into a more pervasive sense of mistrust. The stakes, however, are very different for each. Theo’s connections afford him the latitude to decline the role of Stasi informant with relative impunity, while Armando, the father of Clara – a daughter born of a brief liaison with a German investigative reporter – is only too aware of how tenuous his position is, how readily he might be severed from his child.

All three are, in their own way, exceptional, but Kalayil is careful to ground her characters in contradictions that leave them recognisably clay-footed, so much so that the reader feels, deep in the pit of their stomach, a fresh churn of anxiety at every potential mis-step'

• Northern Soul Magazine
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