Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic

 

Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic.

Published 21st January 2021 by Bloomsbury.

From the cover of the book:

A couple drive from London to coastal Provence. Anya is preoccupied with what she feels is a relationship on the verge; unequal, precarious. 

Luke, reserved, stoic, gives away nothing. As the sun sets one evening, he proposes, and they return to London engaged.

But planning a wedding does little to settle Anya's unease. As a child, she escaped from Sarajevo, and the idea of security is as alien now as it was then. When social convention forces Anya to return, she begins to change. The past she sought to contain for as long as she can remember resurfaces, and the hot summer builds to a startling climax.

Lean, sly and unsettling, Asylum Road is about the many borders governing our lives: between men and women, assimilation and otherness, nations, families, order and chaos.

What happens, and who do we become, when they break down?

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Asylum Road is a book with hidden depths, much like its main character Anya, belied by the pointed starkness of the language Olivia Sudjic uses to tell this story of identity and home.

The beginning of the book finds Anya and her boyfriend Luke driving from London to France to take a holiday, where he unexpectedly asks her to marry him, despite the precarious state of their relationship. Instead of cementing their future together, the process of planning their wedding causes Anya's carefully constructed reality to fracture, with shocking consequences, especially when Luke insists that they travel to Sarajevo to visit her parents - the very place from which she escaped the battleground of the Balkan Wars as a child, and has no wish to return to.

The story is told through the eyes of Anya herself, and right from the outset we can feel her wariness about the nature of her relationship with the boorish Luke. She is constantly second guessing his every look, word, and even silence, to try to work out exactly how she should feel and act to be the woman she thinks he wants her to be. The uncomfortable atmosphere between them is palpable, and every moment she is sure Luke is about to end their relationship, but then he actually asks her to marry him, which gives us a pretty big clue to the fact that Luke really does not know anything about the woman he has become engaged to - until it becomes clear that he is more in love with the idea of Anya, rather than the woman herself.

As the story progresses in a series of staccato scenes that expose the trigger points that lead to the unravelling of Anya, we come to learn that her idea of security has been so warped by her experiences that she can never feel safe anywhere or with anyone. Although she has tried so hard to create an identity which forms a protective shell for herself, and has tried to distance herself from her childhood as much as she can, in essence she is still that little girl sheltering from snipers and bombs in the basement of her family's beleaguered apartment building in war-torn Sarajevo.

Olivia Sudjic manages to convey so much emotion in the powerfully uncomfortable scenes in this book, that they will stay with me for quite some time. This is especially true of the excruciating visit to Sarajevo, where Anya introduces Luke to her broken family and things start to really come apart at the seams, and later when Anya finds herself clutching ever more desperately at something or someone to anchor herself to.

There are some really interesting threads that come up in the telling of this tale. I was intrigued by the way Olivia Sudjic conjures up the notion that Anya's experience somehow mirrors that of her homeland - both fractured, disconnected from their past, struggling with their identity and trying to convey an image that shows little of what still lies beneath the surface. She also tosses out a fascinating line about the issues surrounding immigration and those branded as outsiders with the views of Luke's parents, and rather cleverly, the characters from other nations that Anya meets later in the story.

This is an incredible book, with one of the most nuanced titles I have read for a long time - raw and bleak, but beautifully atmospheric and with the kind of ending that will have you going back and rereading the last chapter more than once just to be certain you have read it right. It's one that is both discomfiting and will elicit discomfort, which might not seem to make much sense, but believe me, it will once you have read it - and read it you really should.

Asylum Road is available to buy now from your favourite book retailer and via Bookshop.org HERE.

Thank you to Laura Meyer at Bloomsbury books for sending me a proof copy of this book in return for an honest review. and to the wonderful author Heidi James and stellar member of my blogging squad Ellie Hawkes for putting this one on my radar.

About the author:

Olivia Sudjic is a writer living in London. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Financial Times, Guardian and the Paris Review.

She is the author of Exposure, a personal essay, and Sympathy, her debut novel, which was a finalist for the Salerno European Book Award, the Collyer Bristow Prize and has been translated into five languages.