For a book club this month, I read a novel that never tells you where it is located. It feels like a European city, but is it Paris where the author lives or Berlin as another person thought or Prague? It has an old city and some rundown neighbourhoods, but we never learn where it is. We also never learn where the two main characters are from. They have come to Europe from two different Global South countries, but which ones? They have family back “home” but what is their native language. They speak to each other in the language of the country where they live and eat at cafés and wander the streets looking to buy an apartment.

The whole book felt unrooted for me. The people felt unrooted, adrift. I guess that was the author’s point. The book was The Anthropologist by Ayşegǘl Savaş.

Part of why the lack of specificity bothered me is that in my own writing, I am hyper aware of place. For my first novel, I visited the Acheron Valley in Greece because that’s where the princess’s kidnapper came from (and because we wanted a holiday and it is a magnificent location). In my Grey County novel, we go to my favorite shale beach twice because it is such an unusual location. In the sequels, I had to rely on online maps, but still I carefully researched the locations in Scotland and Brittany so that the places felt real. I want the characters to walk on the earth, to deal with the environment. And I don’t think we lose universal themes when our locations are specific. I think we lose connection when we are not rooted. Still, I recommend The Anthropologists as an exploration of thirty-somethings drive to find their way wherever they find themselves.