Cambridge author David J Harrison’s debut novel Recursion, published on October 28, reports the Cambridge Independent is a gripping thriller reminiscent of the works by Haruki Murakami and Steven King – and the writer pays tribute to the former with the book’s protagonist being named Haruki Kensagi.
According to the publication, everything that is going to happen already has and during a disruption in the timeline of a sleepy Lake District village, Haruki, an erratic and strungout artist, cannot help but feel that he’s been here before, either in his past, or in his future.
Struggling with both his painting and his mental health, Haruki disappears. His long-suffering wife Jane Kensagi, herself a brilliant musician, interrupts her career to look for him unaware that a malignant and ageless entity awaits them both under the dark fells of the Lake District.
Recursion was actually about 10 years in the making, as the author explains: “It’s been brewing for ages, because I grew up in the Lake District and then, like many of my Windermerian school friends, I had to move away and make a living somewhere, because if you didn’t go into hospitality or something like that there was very little for you up there in the wilds of Cumbria in the late ’80s, early ’90s.
“So my mind’s always been harking to go back, and this is as close as I’ve got. The characters are metropolitan elites that then go up to basically where I grew up and things are very different there – so I really hit them with that difference.
“I wanted to write a tight thriller; I didn’t want to classify it as anything in particular. So it is a thriller but it is a mystery as well – strange things start happening in a kind of Twin Peaks way.”
