Paloma and the Octopus, a novel in progress

The Antonio Gramsci Society UK is delighted to host an exclusive reading of Paloma and the Octopus, a novel in progress, by author Aoife Sadlier.

London, 2019. Thirty-two-year-old Kaya meets sexagenarian queer icon, Cosmas. Their friendship helps Kaya reframe her childhood trauma and discover her orientation towards joy. But when Cosmas dies, Kaya feels shipwrecked. Revisiting the loss of her childhood toys, cruelly discarded by her father, she enters a shapeshifting dreamworld to recover them with her childhood self; her fantastical alter ego, Paloma; and a toy octopus. Can Kaya’s colliding realities help her heal?

The excerpt is taken from a pivotal scene where Kaya first enters the dreamworld. It explores how we can find meaning and flow through the power of our own imaginations, in the process countering capitalism and its commodification of human emotions.

Aoife Sadlier is an Irish fiction writer, illustrator, educator and activist, based in London. In 2017, she completed an ESRC-funded PhD in Culture, Media and Creative Industries (King’s College London) and went on to establish a successful academic career while continuing to write. Aoife’s fiction harnesses magical realism to explore personal and social realities. Her work has been published in Masque & Spectacle, Sexualities, Life Writing and elsewhere. Along with her novel, she is developing a short story collection, Your Dazzling Jazz Claws, which explores human-animal transformations. Aoife loves to dance, travel and receive updates on her adopted orangutans in Malaysian Borneo.

Image by Dear Sunflower