“The motorway is slick with rain and ribbons of light blur past the window: hundreds, thousands of cars. People are leaving London in swarms. Returning to home towns they have not seen in decades. They are queuing at bus terminals, train stations, airports – going wherever they can find accommodation and work. … The river is rising. That’s what Cael needs to think about”.

Picture this: the Thames is about to burst its banks. Jenni Fagan has been playing with that notion for her upcoming novel Zephyrs. In the translated fragment (a kind of preview of the novel), we meet Cael, one of four protagonists, right in the middle of an evacuation out of London. Fagan explores the consequences of this type of natural disaster, looking at the implications on both a personal and a public scale. Cael leaves everything behind: his job, his parents’ cinema, his beloved home-town. All he has in his suitcase are an address, a key and an urn – with contents. They way Fagan describes Cael’s bus journey out of London, the people he encounters and his bizarre new surroundings shows that she has not lost the ‘touch’ she displayed in her successful first novel The Panopticon: the dark humour, almost absurdist situations and strikingly vivid characters she introduces make this Zephyrs a book to look forward to. Jenni Fagan is represented by The Wylie Agency, London.

This translation was published with their consent and kind cooperation.