A father and his estranged 20-year-old daughter set off across France, sharing the driver’s cabin of a long-haul truck. This is a road trip like no other: Paddy, deracinated, footloose, divorced, taking on a temporary job for reasons that become clear later; and daughter Kitty, spiky, provocative, shaved head, grubby jeans and sweater, wrapped in an old mink coat she’s pinched from her grandmother. Occasionally she rewards her father with an ambiguous affectionate response as their edgy banter veers in and out of dangerous territory: the minefield of parenthood.
The narrative is fractured; nothing told chronologically, the surface deliberately throw-away — skewed punctuation, sentences left hanging. Conor O’Callaghan is a prize-winning poet, whose second novel, We Are Not in the World, could be read like a poem, making sense cumulatively, the full picture only gradually emerging.
We follow the here and now of tachograph checks, fast food and crampedovernighters in sleeping bags; darker moments — desperate refugees at the docks; the queasy horror when Paddy stumbles on a haulier roadside gang-bang.
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