What is Nina McConigley reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Nina McConigley, author of How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

I am reading two books right now at once. One is the background for a new writing project I am just starting, Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia by Santilla Chingaipe. I haven’t written a lot of historical fiction, but this is connected to family ancestry, and so I am doing a deep dive to understand the slave trade and convicts in Australia. Especially women convicts. It makes me realize how narrow my view of history and place is. And how we are so taught the history of where we are from, and not...[read on]

About How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, from the publisher:

A bold, inventive, and fiercely original debut novel that begins with an uncle dead and his tween niece’s private confession to the reader—she and her sister killed him, and they blame the British.

Summer, 1986. The Creel sisters, Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna, welcome their aunt, uncle and young cousin—newly arrived from India—into their house in rural Wyoming where they’ll all live together. Because this is what families do. That is, until the sisters decide that it’s time for their uncle to die.

According to Georgie, the British are to blame. And to understand why, you need to hear her story. She details the violence hiding in their house and history, her once-unshakeable bond with Agatha Krishna, and her understanding of herself as an Indian-American in the heart of the West. Her account is, at every turn, cheeky, unflinching, and infectiously inflected with the trappings of teendom, including the magazine quizzes that help her make sense of her life. At its heart, the tale she weaves is:

a) a vivid portrait of an extended family
b) a moving story of sisterhood
c) a playful ode to the 80s
d) a murder mystery (of sorts)
e) an unexpected and unwaveringly powerful meditation on history and language, trauma and healing, and the meaning of independence

Or maybe it’s really:

f) all of the above.

Visit Nina McConigley's website.

The Page 69 Test: How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder.

Writers Read: Nina McConigley.

--Marshal Zeringue