Book of the Week: THE WORDS FOR HER by Thomasin Sleigh
It seems that we have become dependent on photographs for our memories, for our identities, even for our authenticity. This fascinating novel explores what would happen if people started to become unrecordable by media, to disappear from photographs, to become gaps in a world in which image has become a substitute for actuality. The novel succeeds both because there is so much packed into it to think about (how we see, how we remember, the relationships between words and images, and the pictures we make in our heads of the fictional or of the actual) and because it is a superb portrayal of an ordinary life in a small town in Aotearoa and how that ordinary life is impacted as what we had thought of as reality begins to change in ways that we can neither control nor understand.