New Books In Literature

The year is 1985. Durga is visiting her grandmother Mary in rural Malaysia. It’s not a particularly happy occasion: Mary is tough and sharp-tongued, and “home” sparks bad memories for Durga. But a fireworks accident that sends Mary to hospital begins to unravel family secrets that had been building over generations, built by both Mary and Durga. Fragile Monsters, the debut novel by Catherine Menon (Viking, 2021), jumps between the Malaysian Emergency and the Eighties to explore themes of gender, class, and ethnicity in telling a story about a dark family history.  In this interview, Catherine and I discuss the historical setting of Fragile Monsters: a time period that normally doesn’t feature in mainstream English-language fiction. We talk about how she explores memory and shame, gender and race.  Catherine Menon is Australian-British, has Malaysian heritage and lives in London. She is a University lecturer in robotics and has both a PhD in pure mathematics and an MA in Creative Writing. Her short story colle