Photo credit: Helen Giles
Describe your latest book.
My new novel is called
And the Ocean Was Our Sky, illustrated (breathtakingly) by
Rovina Cai. It started with the almost joking question to a friend of mine, “What if
Moby Dick were told by the whale?” and it got weirder from there. Bathsheba is a whale, an apprentice hunter, in a world where whales and men have hunted each other for centuries. They then find themselves on the trail of a rumored monster, but at what cost? You don’t need to be familiar with
Moby Dick at all to read it, though that novel isn’t nearly as difficult as its reputation.
What was your favorite book as a child?
The first book I remember actually reading (rather than just puppeting what had been read to me) was Richard Scarry’s
Storybook Dictionary. That’s where symbols became letters and letters became words. Which was properly mind-blowing. I may never have recovered...