This month, Dua is joined by writer, poet, playwright and musician Kae Tempest for the Service95 Book Club Podcast. With Kae‘s latest novel, Having Spent Life Seeking, Dua’s Monthly Read for June, the pair discuss this tender, searching and deeply human story about survival, atonement and what it means to endure yourself long enough to become someone you can accept – and even love.
At the centre of the novel is Rothko, a character Kae describes as “dislocated from life”, who returns to his seaside hometown after years shaped by addiction, estrangement and incarceration. Though, as Dua and Kae explore, Having Spent Life Seeking is a story that transcends trauma. It is, in Kae’s words, a love story – one preoccupied with how we can continue to care for others while inflicting damage on ourselves and how being truly seen can pull someone back from the edge.
Together, Dua and Kae unpack the novel’s core themes: the distinction between forgiveness and atonement; the instability of home when both you and the place you came from have changed; the conversations between our younger and older selves; and the difficult, ongoing process of becoming fully ‘alive’ again after years spent disconnected from our worlds.
Running throughout the conversation is Kae’s profound connection to his characters, who he describes less as inventions but instead people he has spent years getting to know. Dua and Kae move through the novel’s richly drawn cast, exploring the different ways addiction, class, shame, desire, loneliness and survival manifest across their lives. Rather than reducing anyone to a symbol or circumstance, Kae approaches each character as fully human, reflecting on how people shaped by the same environments can still experience the world in radically different ways.
That expansive outlook sits at the heart of the novel. Having Spent Life Seeking becomes a meditation on identity and self-realisation in a society often hostile to those living outside its accepted structures. Much of its emotional force comes from Kae’s ability to hold brutality and beauty within the same frame. Even in its bleakest passages, the novel remains open to light.
There’s much more to uncover in this insightful and candid exchange, as Dua and Kae delve into the novel’s vividly realised characters and reflect on the role of music, poetry, storytelling and art more broadly as lifelines: forms of expression that allow people to metabolise grief and loneliness into connection, understanding and moments of transcendence.
This is not one to miss. Watch the full conversation between Dua and Kae now on Service95’s YouTube channel or listen to it as a podcast here.
There’s More – Delve Deeper Into Having Spent Life Seeking With The Service95 Book Club...
DISCOVER the books that shaped Kae Tempest as a writer and man
LISTEN to Kae Tempest’s playlist to soundtrack Having Spent Life Seeking
EXPLORE our essay on the rise, fall and rebirth of the UK’s seaside towns
READ our top new reads for June
BOOKMARK what to read when the sun comes out and life feels good again
