PVLF 2026

Interview with Aparna Kapur, Author of ‘An Absence of Squirrels’

An imaginative tale set on the fictional island of Thutta, An Absence of Squirrels explores identity, community, and quiet rebellions with wit and whimsy.
on Jun 29, 2025

Frontlist: Thutta may be fictional, but it feels oddly real. What inspired this island, and how did you imagine its quirks into existence?

Aparna: I’m a big fan of metaphor, and an island is the perfect one. It is a microcosm of a world, with its own rules, its own population, its own ecology—within which I was able to explore interpersonal relationships and political conflict.

What followed was a lot of research. I read books about islands, their people, their habitats. Patrick Barkham wrote about how the past is always present on an island, and about how islanders could be a bit unusual to mainlanders. This was all I needed to hear. I love populating my stories with misfits and weirdos, and for a novel where the past so directly informs the present, an island seemed like the ideal location.

Once I’d chosen to set my book on an island, I had a lot of explaining to do. How an island sustains itself, what sort of work people do, and how the indigenous species are protected. Even after I’d done what I thought was all the necessary work, my editor, Sayoni, poked several holes in it until my world-building was airtight. Which, honestly, was a very fun part of the process.

Luckily, I did not read Frances Hardinge’s Deeplight, Katya Balen’s Ghostlines or any of the other wonderfully imagined books set on fictional islands before writing this book because their elaborate worlds might have shaken my confidence!

Frontlist: Katli pretends to be seven different people. What does this say about identity, especially in that confusing space between childhood and adolescence?

Aparna: Being a person is difficult. Being a child, doubly so. You don’t know who to be, how to be. It’s like being thrown in the middle of an ocean and told to make a sandwich out of the available materials. Everyone around you is eating sandwiches, and so you presume everyone else has somehow found ingredients and learnt how to cook. The truth is, everyone is pretending. The other truth is, all the things that frustrate us about being misfits when we’re young become most valuable when we get older and want to be unlike anyone else. Katli is a very personal representation of who I was as a child. I moved around a lot and found it very hard to make friends. So I would simply pretend to be the most popular girl from my previous school. I was not as organised as Katli is about her various selves and got caught out in a lie several hilarious times. But the desperate efforts to belong; the feeling of being left out, of wanting to be like someone else; the sheer amount of brain space that is taken up by thoughts of what other people think of her—these are all things Katli shares not just with my past self, but also with so, so many kids (and quite a few adults, too).

Frontlist: The title, An Absence of Squirrels, is both intriguing and mysterious. What role does this absence play in the story, and in the metaphorical sense?

Aparna: In the most literal sense, the absence in the title refers to something that isn’t there on the island. But it represents something much larger: the things people don’t talk about, the things people aren’t allowed to talk about, the things that are missing from what appears whole. Depending on the perspective, something that looks complete and in working condition might be broken from several other angles. This is especially true for social systems. Do you think public transport works? If you’re one of several lakhs of people priced out of taking the bus when the ticket prices are doubled (as recently happened in Mumbai), you would think the system was pretty broken. There are always voices missing, experiences not accounted for, silences enforced—and these absences are glaring. What people don’t like to talk about is very often what needs most attention.

Frontlist: The SunLit theme celebrates stories that illuminate the overlooked. What truths about growing up, imagination, or small-town life did you hope to bring into the light through this book?

Aparna: I was recently working on a book of nonsense verse (A Moonful of Ants; illustrated by Priya Kuriyan; published by Pratham Books), and I got interested in the history and meaning of the form. Nonsense verse is absurd and funny, sure, but the reason strange and imaginative writing is important is that it shows us a different way of looking at the world. It shows young readers that the rules of the world are not immovable. That adults don’t always make sense. It stretches their imagination enough that they can envision a different way of living—a more equitable world, a more sustainable way of being. We don’t come into this world knowing inequality; it is taught to us. And we also have to learn to question it, and for that, we need to be able to imagine a world without it. On Thutta, there are some things that are just understood and taken for granted. Things are a certain way because they always have been that way. To question that takes great courage, but I hope the book shows readers that it is, ultimately, worth it.

Frontlist: From mysterious meetings to sneaky schemes, the plot balances absurdity and depth. How do you craft stories that feel light-hearted but still emotionally resonant?

Aparna:I believe that most of my job comes down to creating characters who are real. Once I know them well enough—their opinions and feelings, what their rooms look like, who their neighbours are and whether they get along with them, and so on—then, all I have to do is see how they respond. Any character who is fully realised will have emotional depth and a certain lightness of spirit because that’s how humans are.

Living in this world is completely absurd already, and then we, with the knowledge of that absurdity, go about our lives, making art, forging relationships, and eating ice cream. However grumpy I may be about humanity, writing has shown me that humans are irrepressible, emotional, funny, complicated creatures. As long as my characters are realistic, they will bring all of these things to the story.

Frontlist: Katli’s inner world is so vivid and restless. Did she emerge fully formed in your mind, or did she evolve with each draft?

Aparna: Most of Katli’s evolution was in terms of what I put on the page. Since Katli’s thoughts are so frantic, I felt the need to dial it down at the risk of stressing out the readers. It took me a long time to realise that for the payoff at the end to work well, the readers need to have felt her frustration and restlessness. Slowly, over several rounds, I released more and more of her thoughts and feelings into the story, being careful not to overwhelm the reader or sacrifice the action happening outside her head. After she came into her own, I had a different challenge. My original resolution for the book had to be thrown out the window. Katli is not the sort of person who can lead a revolution; she can’t come up with flawless plans, and she is often too distracted to get to the heart of a problem. So, her way of dealing with the mystery had to be messy and haphazard. It was important to me that this character was faced with this situation.

Frontlist: There’s a sense of quiet magic in Thutta a cat, a train, and secrets that spiral. How do you strike the balance between realism and whimsy in your writing?

Aparna: I love making things up and going on flights of fancy. I have, at best, a tenuous relationship with reality, and have been known to pick fights with people based on the fact that they were mean to me in my dreams. (Sorry to these people.) So the whimsy and magic come more naturally to me. Instead, my focus is on making sure that the writing comes from a place of truth. The balance between unexplained dream logic and an extremely relatable emotional core in the work of filmmakers like David Lynch and Hayao Miyazaki, for instance, give me the confidence that if my stories are firmly rooted and emotionally true, then readers will let me lead them into extremely unlikely scenarios.

Frontlist: If readers walk away remembering one moment or feeling from An Absence of Squirrels, what do you hope it is - and why?

Aparna: If readers could only take away one thing from the book, I’d want them to remember that change doesn’t occur because of one person but every person makes a difference. We’re often told stories of a hero who steps in and solves everything, becoming a symbol of hope. Recently, that has been changing. We now see stories in which communities or groups of people work together to effect change. This book could have focused on any other child on the island, and although it would have changed the story and the manner in which they participated would have been different, ultimately, they all would have ended up at the same place. Rebellion may take different forms, but everyone has a role to play.