The National, June 2013. Interview with William Sutcliffe
It’s a story hewn straight from the very best children’s books. A young boy, looking for a lost football, discovers an entrance to a mysterious tunnel. Crawling along its rat–riddled walls, he finds himself transported into a completely different world. Thirteen-year-old Joshua emerges into a town “bursting with bustle and life … fundamentally different from what I’m used to”. Immediately, he is chased down the most astonishing street he has ever seen, only to be saved by a girl called Leila. He is beguiled by her, and her people.
But this isn’t a clone of Narnia or Alice in Wonderland. In William Sutcliffe’s excellent new novel, The Wall, it quickly becomes obvious that Joshua is a Jewish settler and Leila is Palestinian, and the 42-year-old writer of five previous novels is attempting something far more interesting.
