It’s tempting to describe Christy Edwall’s bold debut, History Keeps Me Awake at Night, as a curious hybrid. The central plot involves a young woman living in London, South African-born Margit, investigating the real-life case of forty-three student protesters who, in 2014, were abducted in Iguala, rural Mexico, and never seen again. Via Margit’s lively, droll voice, Edwall weaves history, biography and philosophical enquiry into a hyper-intertextual tale. The title is taken from a 2018 Whitney Museum retrospective of the life and work of David Wojnarowicz, the late American artist revered for his polymathic creativity and political activism. Margit often invokes the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño and the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle; also mentioned are Susan Sontag, John Berger, Walter Benjamin, Lydia Davis, Kathy Acker and Elena Poniatowska (far from an exhaustive list). Reporting from Vice magazine and the Daily Mail is cited. And a thematically neat sub-strand is Margit’s obsession with Lord Lucan, who half a century ago escaped a murder charge by disappearing.

A hybrid indeed, then. Yet nowadays such books are less a curiosity than a bona fide trend. The press release for History Keeps Me Awake at Night compares Edwall to Patricia Lockwood and Jenny Offill, both vanguardists of a literary mode that rejects boring old storytelling as unequal to