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A supremely superior realist novelist
PAUL SIMON recommends this surgical examination of abuse, the longevity of its implications and the struggles required to confront the pain
THE MIRADOR: Republican prisoners were hurled off it by fascists during the Spanish Civil War [Isiwal/Creative Common]


The Silk Pavilion
by Sarah Walton
Barbican Press, £9.99


 
“WHEN an interior situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate,” wrote Carl Jung.

Sarah Walton’s latest novel is a surgically emotional study of the perils of deliberate and damaging forgetting for both an individual and a whole country. At its heart it examines the utter tyranny of abuse, the longevity of its implications and the struggles required to confront the pain.

As such The Silk Pavilion is a Jungian exegesis that outgrows the thriller genre within which it as first seems to inhabit.

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