Diego Garcia

Edinburgh, 2014. Two friends, Natasha and Luke, arrive from London, the city that killed Luke's brother. Every day is different but the same. They try to go to the library to write but get distracted by bickering - over whether or not it's going to rain or what to do about their tanking bitcoin--trying and failing to resist the sadness which follows them as they drift around the city.

It's on a day like this they meet Diego, a poet. Diego tells them that his mother was from the Chagos Archipelago, and that she and her community were forced to leave their ancestral islands by soldiers in 1973, to make way for a military base. The writers become obsessed with this notorious episode in British history and the continuing resistance of the Chagossian people. They begin a search for a way to share story, even if it is not theirs to tell.

Angry and sad and funny, this collaborative fiction builds on the true fact of another collaborative fiction: one created by the British and US governments to dispossess a people of their homeland.