Welcome to Litsy!

“I didn’t ask her if it had been Walt Whitman and his declaration that he was vast and contained multitudes that she’d read as she lay on the bed in the boarding house at Dover, but it would have been appropriate, because: She was an anti-Zionist who went to Israel for her holidays. She read the Telegraph and voted Labour. She ate bacon for breakfast and then cooked kosher lunches at the club for other Jewish pensioners. She said she was disappointed in me when I explained how to jiggle coins out of public phones, yet she stole small plants from Tel-Aviv airport and smuggled them back to England in her handbag.” Pippa Goldschmidt’s protagonists have a special way of observing the world: intelligent as they undoubtedly are, they all suffer from a weird and warped lack of understanding certain parts of life. It is science that helps them regulate the world they live in. It is science that brings chaos upon them. Goldschmidt connects realism, hyperrealism, surrealism, satire, subtle political statements, anti-Semitic tendencies, and the gender gap in a unique and surprising way. Pippa Goldschmidt is an important new voice in contemporary fiction. Pippa Goldschmidt grew up in London, and now lives in Edinburgh. She is a graduate of the renowned Masters course in creative writing at the University of Glasgow. She has a PhD in astronomy and worked as an astronomer for several years at Imperial College, followed by posts in the civil service including working in outer space policy. In 2012 Pippa was awarded a prestigious Scottish Book Trust/Creative Scotland New Writers Award. From 2008 to 2012 she was writer in residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, based at the University of Edinburgh. The Falling Sky is her first novel and was runner-up in the Dundee International Book Prize.