In this episode, a conversation with poet and author Siân Hughes, whose book Pearl is longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.

Pearl is a stunning novel, originally published in the United Kingdom by The Indigo Press, and has just been republished in Australia by University of Queensland Press.

Pearl is a ghost story, a folk story, a story of loss and familial haunting. Hughes’ narrator, Marianne, is eight years old when her mother goes missing. Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’s love, and the songs and stories of her childhood. Discovering a medieval poem called Pearl and trusting in its promise of consolation, Marianne sets out to make a visual illustration of it, a task that returns to over and over but somehow never manages to complete.