Aislinn Hunter's new novel The Certainties (2020) opens with its narrator staring at the sea from a hotel balcony. The narrator is one of three friends who have been placed under detention at the French border town of Portbou. The trio is hoping to get into neutral Spain, and from there to Lisbon, Portugal, where they will sail for what was then, in 1940, another neutral country, the USA. It isn't until Page 7 that we learn the narrator's gender ("I smoothed my own moustache with a nonchalance I knew wasn't convincing"), and that, despite a prose style that has more in common with John Banville than Walter Benjamin, the narrator is Walter Benjamin.
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