Lara Fergus

My Sister Chaos is a remarkable feat of creativity. Set in an unnamed country with three female characters known only as the cartographer, the sister and the mathematician, it tells a story of love that transcends a chaos that few of us could possibly imagine. The novel won the 2012 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and was nominated for Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Debut Fiction (2012), and the Dobbie Literary Award(2011).

The story begins with the cartographer obsessively mapping her house. She has been separated from her sole surviving relative, her sister, since they fled civil war in their home country and her sister abandoned her in the motel where they had been placed as refugees. The cartographer had been employed on a high level project mapping her country, but now she works at a lower level because even though she has learned the language of her new country, others have made assumptions about her competence. (See a Sensational Snippet here). She makes sense of traumatic experiences that are gradually revealed by bringing order to her house. Nothing can be disturbed because that would interfere with the mapping process. It becomes clear to the reader that the cartographer has a warped sense of reality because of all that she has been through.

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