Show Me the Sky - Softcover

Nicholas Hogg was born in Leicester in 1974. After studying psychology, he travelled widely, living in Japan, Fiji and America and he taught literacy skills to refugees in London. In 2005 he won the New Writing Ventures prize for fiction. Show Me The Sky is his first novel.

This ambitious first novel by British writer Hogg moves back and forth in time and across several continents, offering multiple narrative strands and characters. The novel’s central arc follows Detective James Dent, who has spent the last year on the hunt for missing British rock star Billy K. Obsessed with the case, Dent abandons his job to track a final, desperate lead in Australia. Intercut with the hunt are passages from a journal Billy K was reading when he was last spotted. It contains the writing of nineteenth-century Fijian missionary Nelson Babbage, whose vivid rendering of colonial oppression forms the backbone of Hogg’s themes of identity and assimilation. Other narrative strands follow motorcycle rider Cal and the touching letters he pens to his girlfriend while slowly dying in the Australian Outback, and an exhausted teenage runaway who appears to be the teenage incarnation of Detective Dent. There is so much going on plotwise that the story never quite gels, yet its hybrid nature—it’s part thriller, part historical novel—and confident writing make for an intriguing read. --Joanne Wilkinson