I don’t want to blend in, like some of the others, slough away the past, adopt this new place, or rather attempt to be adopted by it, as an orphan. No place will mother or father me now. Countries are not mine and I am not theirs. I feel nothing for them, they are merely temporary, political intrusions into geographic cartography. Precision and disarray, light and dark, a map that will tame a house, a house one can never know. In this searing debut, Lara Fergus startles the reader at every turn, weaving the politics of gender, race, language and sexuality through a story of war and peace, across geographies and histories. My Sister Chaos remains topical over a decade after it was first published.