"The actor turned writer Sophie Ward likes to fuel her novels with philosophical conundrums and set herself complex writerly challenges. Her ingenious, Booker-longlisted Love and Other Thought Experiments was structured around philosophical thought experiments, from Pascal's Wager to Descartes' Demon, with a chapter narrated by an ant living inside a character's brain. The Schoolhouse explored the ethics of self-directed schooling and of policing in a complicated cross-period procedural."
"Now she turns her attention to questions of justice, freedom and power in the 1970s United States, with a tripartite structure bringing together three women two real and one imagined. It's 1971: the Manson Family have just been found guilty and hundreds of thousands are marching against the Vietnam war. In the Netherlands, 25-year-old Andrea Dworkin escapes her abusive husband and attends a debate between Chomsky and Foucault on justice and power."
"The third character is loosely based on the family history of Ward's own Korean-American wife. Phyllis Patterson welcomes her son home to rural Illinois from the army base in South Korea, and attempts to build a relationship with her new Korean daughter-in-law and grandchildren. All three women are testing their own capacity for justice in an unjust world. It's a clever idea for a novel, using the connections between the women as hinge points."
Set in 1971, three women navigate questions of justice, freedom and power against the backdrop of the Manson convictions and Vietnam War protests. Andrea Dworkin escapes an abusive marriage in the Netherlands and attends a debate between Chomsky and Foucault. Muriel Rukeyser returns to protest and campaigns for imprisoned South Korean poet Kim Chi-ha while managing frail health and a relationship with literary agent Monica McCall. Phyllis Patterson welcomes her son home from a South Korean army base and strives to bond with his Korean wife and grandchildren. The narratives interlock through political activism and personal ties to probe individual capacities for justice.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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