Gathering Evidence

Shel Murray studies primates. She has taken a place on a research trip to an exclusive national park to observe one of the last troops of bonobos before they are gone, and the troop is not behaving the way the literature says it should. Members go missing. The reserve's staff will not explain the deaths.

At home, her partner John is recovering from a violent assault he has no memory of, in a house whose security system logs visitors who were never there. He is writing about extinction and about a machine that reconstructs experience from data, and he is not sleeping.

Martin MacInnes's second novel runs the two accounts against each other, both narrated by people whose reliability is failing in different ways, and asks what evidence is worth when the observer is part of what is being observed.