Interrogation Room

A spare and stunning debut novel that audaciously reinvents the form of the “police interrogation,” placing a young Indigenous woman at the centre of the narrative. Introducing a superb new writer from Alchemy by Knopf.

In this taut, slim and hauntingly beautiful novel, we are introduced to a young woman who sits in a police interrogation room. Here she is alone at first, listening to the everyday sounds of the station. Then a female police constable enters, and poses a series of questions. These questions are meted out slowly, a handful each chapter—questions that are by design rote and mundane, yet experienced by the young woman, and the reader, as increasingly absurd to the point of violence. They concern a sexual assault the woman has endured, and is now reluctantly but determinedly reporting.
Trapped in the interrogation room’s clinical environment, the young woman frees herself through her thoughts and memories, imagining different ways of answering the impossible. But time and again, the constables abrupt questions interrupt―and this unrelenting cycle builds to the point of agony as we turn the pages, exposing an impassible gulf.
As Dionne Brand writes in praise of this astonishing debut: “What Kristen Gray Bos accomplishes here is a rejection of the compulsion to narrate assault in ways that are conventional, linear, confessional, and voyeuristic. ”