Susan Barker talks to Lauren Owen

Novelist Susan Barker talks about her latest work, Old Soul, the sinister and unnerving story of a strange and mysterious woman who never ages and never dies but those around her do.

Two grieving strangers meet by chance at Osaka airport and uncover a disturbing connection. Jake’s best friend and Mariko’s twin brother died 6,000 miles apart in brutal and unfathomable circumstances. Each encountered a mesmerising, dark-haired woman in the days before their deaths, a woman who came looking for Mariko then disappeared.

‘Like nothing else I’ve ever read . . .  The kind of story you tell around a campfire as the lights of civilisation begin to flicker out around you; a global, intelligent and ambitious archetypal nightmare’ Kristen Roupenian, author of Cat Person

Barker is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her previous novels include The Incarnations, shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction. Here she talks to fellow novelist Lauren Owen, author of The Quick and Small Angels.