Reservoir

Livi Michael is an award-winning writer of books for adults, young adults and children. Her short stories have been widely published in various places including Granta, The Lonely Crowd and the Manchester Review. Her play, Singers Not Sinners was performed in Oldham in 2022. She has taught creative writing in various universities and was Programme Leader of the MA in Publishing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Confronting themes of memory, trauma, childhood violence, criminality and responsibility, Michael uses informal conversations, dinner-table discussion, open fora and glimpsed flashbacks to show how much more than rational analysis is needed to unearth the “darkness of prior causes” and to give voice to our hidden, “unspoken” pasts.We follow the keynote speaker Hannah Rossier as she attempts to maintain the authority and dignity of her scholarly credentials while being overwhelmed by a past she thought she had left behind. In a very good novel that somehow manages to create tension, even dread, in the build-up to the delivery of a lecture, Michael shows us that the professional pursuit of truth in an academic setting can act as a perfect cover for the burying of a personal truth too difficult to face. In our worthy intellectual pursuits, we are reminded, we had best understand our motives, lest we forget that all academic discovery – however methodologically sound – has its origins in subjectivity. Fiction, that is, reveals the true context for scholarship: not the university campus, but the flawed human being.