Sarah Lotz

The British author goes underground in her new novel.

- Jonathan Wright

There’s a reason Sarah Lotz’s new novel, The White Road, deals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While living in South Africa, Lotz endured a “horrible home invasion”. This didn’t just happen once. “The gang that attacked us came back and they kept coming back,” she says. “Eventually you go for a month without any sleep.”

Lotz had already endured difficult experiences, including time spent on the streets as a teenager in Paris. She was about to learn that PTSD, an anxiety disorder, can creep up on you. “It can be cumulative,” she says. “This experience basically kicked it off. My husband, who was there at the time, and my daughter, didn’t have it. I was like, ‘This is bullshit, I’m just going to get over this thing.’”

It wasn’t that easy. Lotz tried talking therapy (“I couldn’t stand it”), anti-anxiety medication and moving to “the border of Wales and Shropshire where there’s nothing but sheep”. Now there’s The White Road, a novel that divides its narrative between South Wales and Mount Everest.

If the book’s cover brings forth images of noble adventurers overcoming trauma, that’s not really Lotz’s style. One of the book’s two narrators, Simon Newman, is a man whose idea for a clickbait-driven website revolves around filming “people who have died in horrific accidents”. Newman goes underground in Wales, in search of three drowned bodies that have never been recovered.