In a time when looking into the past has become a socially unacceptable and illegal act in the Nation, a group of scholars are offered an attractive residency to allow them to pursue their projects. When the residency transpires to be a devastating trick, these Researchers go on the run, and soon discover that their projects all relate to one major event: the Isletese Disaster – the decline and subsequent devastation fifty years earlier of a long-forgotten roaming archipelago called The Islets.

 

One figure emerges as central to all of their work: Hester Heller, a reformed cult musiker turned student recruited from the Institute for Transmission as an agent of the state and tasked with gathering reconnaissance on the Disaster by using her old band Vehicle as a cover. Heller is the key to the Researchers collective story, which they try to piece together while evading their pursuers.

 

Compiled from the Researchers’ disparate documentation, recollections, and even their imaginations, Vehicle is a metafictional work of literary speculative fiction, and a timely and daring exploration of xenophobia, exploitation, the writing of histories and legacies, and the politics of translation.

About Jen Calleja

Jen Calleja is a writer and translator based in London. Her work as appeared in The London Magazine, Ambit, Another Gaze, TLS, and New Statesman, to name a few. She has published two collections of poetry, Serious Justice (Test Centre, 2016) and Hamburger in the Archive (if a leaf falls, 2019). Prototype Publishing published her first collection of short fiction, I'm Afraid That's All We've Got Time For, in 2020. Her translation of The Pine Islands by Marion Poschmann was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2019. Jen is also a founding editor of Praspar Press, a micro-publisher of Maltese literature in English translation.