Over at Splice, I put some questions to Milly Weaver, the editor at London-based Wundor Editions, about the thinking behind her decision to acquire UK publication rights to the Australian novelist Elizabeth Tan’s début, Rubik:
Above all, Rubik’s timeliness struck a chord. The novel offers a prescient exploration into the feelings of loneliness and technological anxiety that come with living in our hyper-networked Internet age, which I thought would really resonate with contemporary readers. Rubik embarks upon an insightful and often bleak depiction of life under neoliberalism, while still managing to be generous, accessible. On the one hand you’ve got a biting satire of vacuous, consumer-driven and technology-obsessed contemporary society, and on the other hand it’s a full-hearted adventure story. It’s not easy to achieve such equilibrium between social commentary and straightforward entertainment in a single work; Rubik strikes the balance perfectly.
Infinite Patience 