Sometimes educated guesses about missing bits are wrong, causing the reader to arrive at different meanings from what was intended.
Likewise, the novel has two poles, and twists enough to wrong-foot the reader.
"In its insistent interrogation of Jewishness... it is by turns breezily open and thought-provokingly opaque, and consistently wrong-foots the reader," wrote Alex Clark in the Guardian.
This was the type of fiction I wanted to write, wrong-footing the reader on every page, drawing you into an appalling story, making you laugh one minute and recoil in horror the next.
Raised from the merely formulaic by Freeman's emotional literacy, sense of place and an uncanny ability to wrong-foot the reader and produce a wholly unexpected ending, The Burying Place is far more than the sum of its parts.
There are clues: large golden fish in the river called "dorado" (an oceanic species), current igneous activity, and impala: features which don't tally and instead topographically distort and wrong-foot the reader.
In its insistent interrogation of Jewishness – from the exploration of the relationship between the perpetrators of violence and hatred and their victims, to the idea of the individual at once in opposition to and in love with his or her culture – it is by turns breezily open and thought-provokingly opaque, and consistently wrong-foots the reader.
To be told that this is wrong, somehow mistreating the reader, made me suddenly quite angry.
Weeds (Profile, £15.99) is a beautifully written meditation on "plants in the wrong place", drawing the reader into a world we usually take for granted.
Same goes for public editors: I was wrong to call the reader a coward; that was engaging in the same debased discourse that I condemn.
