We Are Not in the World
CONOR O’CALLAGHAN
(DOUBLEDAY, 272 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • tel 020 7799 4064

In recent months, our news reports have often featured tales of articulated lorries. Containers have been pictured being boarded by desperate migrants, or snaking around Manston Airport, or turning the Port of Dover into a Christmas car park. We have been taught to fear what will happen when those lorries fail to deliver their cornucopia of goods; what will happen when those trucks belch out disease and pollution; and what will happen when those HGVs are co-opted by the more callous people-smuggling gangs. Yet, for all that prominence in our news media, and for all of our daily dependence on this vehicular journeying, the realm of the lorry driver is scarcely well represented in works of literature.