Claire Corbett

Watch Over Me

Corbett’s atmospheric landscape, with its eerie glacial light, its drifts of fog and explosives, wild geese and Sequestered Forest, is so vividly realised and starkly described, the cold and fog seem to creep beyond the page. For the struggling residents under military occupation, death comes delivered from the sky. Yet for Sylvie and her family, love persists in all its forms.

The pressure of my blood, the beat of my heart, is a message to you. You read each second of my body's life.

It is the present day. The foggy northern city of Port Angelsund is under occupation by the soldiers of Garrison. Sylvie is a young woman just trying to survive. When she is singled out for punishment at a Garrison checkpoint, a young lieutenant rescues her from torture. Though she knows the terrible risks of collaboration, she cannot stop herself from falling in love. Watched by Garrison’s vast machinery of surveillance, Sylvie discovers she is also under the protective and suspicious gaze of her lover.

When her older brother returns on a terrorist mission that will throw the city into chaos, Sylvie’s loyalties are tested beyond breaking point. Her deep bond with her brother and her illicit passion for her Garrison officer are loves that cannot coexist. Whatever she does is betrayal.

In the spirit of Hiroshima Mon Amour and Suite Francaise, this sensual and heart-breaking novel brings the classic conflicts of war and occupation, devotion and treachery, up to the present minute. While the unimaginable power of modern warfare advances, Watch Over Me reminds us that the things at stake – survival, refuge and love - remain the things worth fighting for.

This gem – a book of flaming affections and indefatigable loves, dystopian and convincing, a tale of pilgrimages and adventures, beautifully textured and lovingly narrated.

Claire Corbett is at once a lyrical fantasist and a writer who tough-mindedly grips felt realities. Watch Over Me depicts a world where love and suspicion, resistance and atrocity, pride and shame are so intricately intertwined that the righteous struggle of Port Angelsund against Garrison is at once psychologically tense and narratively riveting. The book feels like a one of its kind mixture of Aldous Huxley, Peter Carey, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

View more...