Description

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

‘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