Hybrid novels fusing prose and poetry are in vogue: witness the success of Derek Owusu’s prize-winning That Reminds Me, Jen Calleja’s innovative Vehicle and Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, among others. Playwright and lyricist Megan Barker follows suit in this poignant debut about the pain of witnessing a loved one’s depression at close quarters. Or at least that’s how I read it: the book, 160 pages long, raw as well as wrought, is narrated by a woman, Megan, who loses a male friend – the titular Kit – in circumstances that, as with much else here, you’re invited to infer; told in bittersweet retrospect, it’s a novel of spaces and gaps, of things that didn’t happen or might have happened, or ought to have.
Megan and Kit meet in the 90s while living in Glasgow. Their friendship is joyous, intense, platonic-ish – she’s attached and he’s sleeping with her flatmate, which she finds herself overhearing more keenly than she’d like.
