Castawoke
Castawoke
Seven university students. Six weeks away. Prepare for absolute chaos, but not as you might imagine it.
Some people go travelling to find themselves. These seven went to save everyone else.
When a student organises what she calls a collective action summit in the living room of their student house, the outcome is inevitable. They are going to the island. They are going to listen, to engage, to help. They have the theory, the framework and the conviction. They are going to take everything three years of seminars on global inequality, postcolonial theory and social justice have given them and apply it somewhere that actually needs it.
They arrive wearing their convictions on their sleeves. Literally. The causes are on full display and the locals, clearly, are going to recognise them for what they are. People who know. People who care. People who have come a very long way to make a difference.
The island has other ideas. The island has not read the syllabus.
This, it turns out, is the problem.
Time begins to behave strangely and people question their motives, and this is before they have even begun what they ultimately came to do.
Castawoke follows the group through their increasingly unhinged attempts to find the oppression they came looking for, help people who have never heard of the causes printed on them, and to hold together a worldview that a competent and entirely self-sufficient place is quietly dismantling simply by existing. It is a collision between a world carefully constructed in seminar rooms and the rather inconvenient reality of a place that was getting along perfectly well before they arrived and shows absolutely no signs of stopping.
Castawoke is a sharp, warm and deep novel about the gap between good intentions and reality. It is about the particular kind of certainty that flourishes in controlled environments and what becomes of it when the environment stops being controlled, and the confliction between the person you perform and the person you are when the performance runs out of road.
With a cast of brilliantly observed characters, dialogue that climbs with a crescendo of energy and a plot that builds to a devastatingly simple revelation, Castawoke announces a bold and brilliant new voice in British satirical fiction.
Castawoke is for anyone who has ever confused caring about something with understanding it.
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