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three questions
“If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.” —Magritte
Orkney by Amy Sackville Counterpoint Press | www.counterpointpress.com
A literature professor honeymoons with his much younger bride on the Orkney Islands in this beautifully rendered tale of love and obsession. If you have yet to read Amy Sackville, prepare to be entranced.
Shelf Unbound: Like your debut novel The Still Point, which was long-listed for the Orange Prize, Orkney is very much a novel of place, with the sea being not just the new young bride’s obsession but also a character, a metaphor, a part of the novel’s overall dreamscape. How did you decide 6
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to place your May-December newlyweds by the sea? Amy Sackville: The place and the characters arrived at the same time; it was that situation, of a couple in isolation on the island, that I started with. (Two clichés in one—the professor marrying his student, the woman gaz-