Annabel

Many novels deal with a character’s struggle to develop and establish identity and a sense of the self. Few do it in such a direct way as Annabel. Wayne Blake is born in 1968 into the small, remote town of Croydon Harbour in Labrador, where gender roles are frozen in ice and set in stone: husbands shoot, fish and live off the landscape; wives are equally practical, cleaning the home, cooking and rearing young. But things are different for Wayne because he is neither man nor woman. He and she is both – born with male and female characteristics and physiology.

The decision that the baby should live as a boy – taken by his taciturn father Treadway, opposed in varying degrees by his mother Jacinta and teacher Tomassina – is a secret that cannot remain secret as Wayne enters his teenage years and his body and identities begin to assert themselves, rebelling against the medication and the social pressure that wants Wayne to be a man and nothing else. Wayne’s journey of self-determination and the consequent battle for acceptance within his family and society is handled with compassion and subtlety. In Annabel, Kathleen Winter has written a compelling and convincing debut novel that reads almost as a modern myth – a myth based on the taboo reality of intersexuality.