Description

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BETTY TRASK AWARD

A child is beguiled by a poem read to him by his mother. The poem follows this elusive narrator like a whisper throughout his life, echoing across the years in the stories and lives of others as they are recounted to him: an enigmatic and beloved schoolteacher who leaves behind a dark secret after his death; a woman who lays the table for a son she knows will never return home; a young man shunned by his family, who finds solace and freedom in the letters from an estranged aunt; a black-and-white photograph that tells of another family, afflicted with generations of tragedy.

With fierce imagination, Issa Quincy has constructed a transcendent portrait of humanity, deftly illuminating a symphony of memories, murmurs and phantoms that add up to an ordinary human life.

Publisher Review

Done rather in the manner of Rachel Cusk… Quincy delivers vignettes that are all the more haunting for being indistinct… Descriptive passages display Quincy’s lyricism… The novel acts as a meditation on time, meaning and forgetfulness * Financial Times * [A] seductively conversational debut… A dizzying chain of densely nested episodes circling themes of trauma and remembrance… The writing is always absorbing… The novel’s style is its own reward * Daily Mail * Like a magic trick in which centuries emerge from a thimble, this brief and deeply satisfying novel reveals the ongoing miracle of survival – cloaked in the everyday — Lucy Ives Few books deserve the appellation “Proustian”; Issa Quincy’s Absence, with its circling, wondrous, erudite prose, is one of them. An auspicious debut — Karan Mahajan A shimmering mirror of a novel, elegiac, Proustian, kaleidoscopic, where absence becomes the gravitational force of creation — Lila Azam Zanganeh This exquisite novel creates a beguiling soundscape of echoes and murmurs that reverberates in the mind long after the reading… Lucid, captivating prose… Recalling the novels of W. G. Sebald… A mournful and luminous meditation on the work of remembering — Christine Lai