About the Author

Natasha Soobramanien, British-Mauritian, and Luke Williams, Scottish, are the authors of Genie and Paul and The Echo Chamber, respectively. They used to live in Edinburgh but at the time of writing live in Brussels, across the park from one another, where they meet up every day for a walk.

Reviews

‘As an experiment in “fictive criticism”, this is a new type of social novel, one that avoids stable conclusions. Instead it demands the reader’s own critique.’
— Gurnaik Johal, TLS


‘Intimate yet expansive, heartbroken but unbowed, and a book about writing that is anything but solipsistic, it’s a stirring novel that lights a way forward for politically conscious fiction.’
— Anthony Cummins, Observer


‘Focusing on the ongoing atrocity of the Anglo-American occupation of the Chagos Islands and displacement of their native people, Diego Garcia is a subtle contemplation of the uses of fiction and narrative (for good and bad) and how, where and why individual and collective narratives meet. Taking in artists from Kader Attia to Sophie Podolski, as well as depictions of the Chagossians in poetry, documentaries and essay films, it is a moving study of friendship, allyship and creative forms of political struggle.’
— Juliet Jacques, author of Trans: A Memoir

‘This thought-provoking, brilliant book sends a hypersensitive probe into the subduction zone between solidarity and exploitation.’
— Nell Zink, author of Avalon

‘Diego Garcia is an important and highly original work, incredibly well-researched and thought-through.’
— Philippe Sands, author of The Last Colony

‘Diego Garcia is a beautiful, poignant, anarchic experiment in collaboration and collectivity. This novel does wonderful, innovative things to form and to politics – to style, to voice, to creolization, to propaganda and power and archipelic thinking – and especially to the denials inbuilt to British novels and British politics. Somehow it finds a way of exposing Britain's ongoing shameful occupation of the Chagos Islands while also being a document of literary resistance and originality. It offers models for future thinking.’
— Adam Thirlwell, author of Lurid and Cute 

'As affecting as it is intellectually agile, Diego Garcia achieves what few novels even aim at – it opens up fresh ways of reading both history and fiction.’
— Pankaj Mishra, author of Run and Hide

‘Through the intricately woven histories and the corresponding fictions within fictions, the compassion expressed in Diego Garcia highlights the absence of it in those who, forsaking their obligations towards other human beings, exiled the Chagossians from their home. Written in a language at once distant and interior, dazzling, we see that until the Chagossian people are home, nobody is home.’
— Vanessa Onwuemezi, author of Dark Neighbourhood

‘Listless and urgent, dulled by sadness and yet dancing with anger, moments of unexpected beauty and strange, bright comedy – in Diego Garcia, these tensions are held together by the energy of a singular collaboration, where the interplay between fundamental separation and common cause is staged even at the level of page layout, the writing of the sentences themselves. It is a novel of shared and unshared experience that is wholly unapologetic about not knowing how such a thing is to be written, but risking it nevertheless. The result is compelling, challenging, unprecedented, essential.’ — Kate Briggs, author of This Little Art 

‘Reading Diego Garcia is unlike any other experience. An abstract blend of intersecting narratives, non-fiction asides, indulgent email chains and stories within stories all collide to produce a speculative work of fiction, about how fleeting encounters can change the trajectories of our lives.’ — DAZED