Aoife’s Analysis of Ambiguity

Paula Xiberras

Aoife Clifford has had a couple of visits to Tasmania and found it lovely both times she says Hobart and Launceston are ‘two fantastic cities’ and she’s keen to get back to explore the natural wilderness and of course MONA.

I recently spoke to Aoife (pronounced Ee-Fa) about her new crime book ‘All These Perfect Strangers’. The ‘Perfect’ alluded to in the title may be an ironic nod to the imperfection of most of us and our wrestling with varying degrees of responsibilities met or not met and guilty feelings for crimes real or imagined.

In law school Aoife became interested in how we decide who is responsible for a crime when so many relating factors may be blurred. In the novel Aoife explores how past crimes might impact on present and future ones.

Aoife likens the factors of crime as not being intact but in threads that need to be brought together and as Aoife says speaking from the viewpoint of her protagonist, Piper, all stories ‘could be told a hundred different ways’.

When Piper goes off to university to start afresh after an incident in her small town she finds ambiguity among her new friends and becomes part of events just as twisted and blurred as those she left behind in her home town. To say anymore would spoil the negotiation of twists and turns this book presents as Aoife forces us to think about the very nature of crime and its effects.

Another issue Aoife wanted to address in this book was the usually ‘easy disposal’ of female characters in crime novels without acknowledging their humanness and the pain at their loss.

This book is unique in among books of its genre in illustrating how we grapple with guilt and responsibility and how these like the threads of crime are never clear cut but blurred and muddied.

‘All these Perfect Strangers’ is out now published by Simon and Schuster.