Since Ninety-One

About the book

What is owed to
the record

Since Ninety-One takes its title from the year a country became its own and begins counting what has been spent since. Four storylines run in parallel, each in its own register, and converge on a single room in Geneva where a settlement is being negotiated by people who will not have to live inside it.

The novel moves between a terrace in Miami and a dugout on a Ukrainian line with the same attention, and declines to rank one world above the other. The diplomatic back channel is rendered as carefully as the trench, and both turn out to be more morally complicated than the genre usually allows. What is left unsaid carries as much weight as what is spoken.

Bearing witness is not a passive act. Writing it down, accurately, in enough copies, is both the subject of the book and its argument.

It is a book about testimony and record-keeping: who keeps the record, who is permitted to correct it, and what a private life costs when a public settlement is reached. Readers of le Carré will recognise the tradecraft; the landscape writing owes something to Didion. The voice is its own.