Richard Price – The Island

It begins as an ordinary day of frayed nerves and suburban fractiousness. Following a sharp argument with his wife, Graham sets out across London with his young daughter, Jasmine. It is a journey born of a need for space – on the surface, a simple drive to clear the air. But as they move through the city, the familiar begins to feel inexplicably foreign. The motorways are tightening. The air is changing. On every screen, in every shop window, a recurring image of a remote island haunts the broadcast – an image that pulls Graham back toward a childhood he has tried to outrun. As the horizon darkens and the path home becomes increasingly uncertain, Graham is forced to navigate the shifting boundary between a father’s protective instinct and a world that is rapidly losing its grip on the known. The Island is a devastatingly controlled novella from one of the UK’s finest poets. It is a story of what remains when the structures of the everyday fall away: the memories we cannot escape, and the desperate, quiet love between a father and his child.

Richard Price is a Scottish poet, novelist, and former British Library curator known for award-winning poetry collections like Lucky Day and Small World, as well as his work with the “Informationist” poetry movement. His work often explores themes of family, personal relationships, and environmental politics.

Louisa Lim – Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong

“Cantonese is a very sweary language”, announces Louisa Lim. The award-winning journalist is explaining the joy of using so many expletives when speaking about the place she grew up in. Ms. Lim has masterfully captured so much of the essence of what the British called a “barren rock” with personal accounts and observations of the place she loves, Hong Kong. For decades, Hong Kong’s history was simply not taught, especially to Hong Kongers, obscuring its origins as a place of refuge and rebellion. When protests erupted in 2019 and were met with escalating suppression from Beijing, Louisa Lim—raised in Hong Kong as a half-Chinese, half-English child, and now a reporter who has covered the region for nearly two decades—realized that she was uniquely positioned to unearth the city’s untold stories. Lim’s deeply researched and personal account casts startling new light on key moments: the British takeover in 1842, the negotiations over the 1997 return to China, and the future Beijing seeks to impose. Indelible City features guerrilla calligraphers, amateur historians and archaeologists, and others who, like Lim, aim to put Hong Kongers at the center of their own story. Wending through it all is the King of Kowloon, whose iconic street art both embodied and inspired the identity of Hong Kong—a site of disappearance and reappearance, power and powerlessness, loss and reclamation. 

Louisa Lim is a journalist and author. She is the co-host of award-winning The Little Red Podcast covering China. Louisa holds a PhD in Journalism, she is a charming and fascinating guest.