North’s narrators, by contrast, appear to have stepped on to the page fully formed – and their corporeality provides Sophie’s shape-shifting with a neat and necessary foil. Their accounts overlap like the circles in a Venn diagram, but rather than finding the real Sophie at the centre, we are confronted instead by a conundrum: a series of angles that refuse to come together into a recognisable shape. Through their stories we see Sophie and her brief life in a series of snapshots, from the wide-angled (her humdrum childhood in smalltown Iowa the twists and turns of her odd, brilliant directorial career) to the close-up: her esoteric wardrobe her fondness for chicken and oatmeal her vast, candid eyes, on which each of the narrators separately fixates. Sophie’s tale is told posthumously by the six people who knew her best: her lover her brother her husband her college crush her colleague and the journalist who tracked her film-making career from its artless beginning to its sad and shocking end.
W ho is Sophie Stark? This is the question that drives Anna North’s gripping, gracefully constructed debut.
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