Interrogation Room (A novel)

A spare and stunning debut novel that audaciously reinvents the form of the “police interrogation,” placing a young Indigenous woman at the centre of the narrative. Introducing a superb new writer from Alchemy by Knopf.

In this taut, slim and hauntingly beautiful novel, we are introduced to a young woman who sits in an unadorned setting, where she remains throughout the book: a police interrogation room. Here she is alone at first, listening to the everyday sounds of the station. Then a female police constable enters, and poses a series of questions. These questions are meted out slowly, a handful each chapter—questions that are by design rote and mundane, yet experienced by the young woman, and the reader, as increasingly absurd to the point of violence. They concern a sexual assault the woman has endured, and is now reluctantly but determinedly reporting.
    The interrogation room’s clinical environment leads the young woman to move in her thoughts and memories towards different ways of answering the impossible, and through the unspooling of her consciousness we gradually learn more about her life, including her Indigeneity, which is so essential to how she moves through the world. The constable's questions, in turn, interrupt the woman’s internal digressions―and this unrelenting cycle builds as we turn the pages, escalating the novel's tension as it exposes the impassible gulf between the queries and what can be expressed in answers or, sometimes, in refusals to answer.
    As Dionne Brand writes in praise of this astonishing debut: “The prose is accomplished and confident, with real energy and propulsion behind every line. What Kristen Bos accomplishes here is a rejection of the compulsion to narrate assault in ways that are conventional, linear, confessional, and voyeuristic. ”