Fiction

An extract from Sara Baume’s new novel, Seven Steeples: THE MOUNTAIN WAS full of miniature eyes. There were the yellow discs of long-eared owls, the purblind blots of pygmy shrews, the immobile domes of bluebottles, the glinting black gems of brown rats.

Fiction

Robin is the opening chapter of Sara Baume’s novel A Line Made By Walking: Works about Carpet, I test myself: Mona Hatoum, 1995. An expanse of silicone rubber entrails fitted impeccably around one another to form a flawless floor. Our intestines are several metres long; a fact which has always astonished me. So maybe Hatoum’s piece is about the astonishing capacity of the human body. Or maybe it’s about how extravagantly attached we are to the things we own, as if they were the insides of our bodies and not just the insides of our houses. Furnishings, ornaments, even the upholstery. Such that we end up devoting more effort to preserving the carpet than we do preserving our intestines.