Ixelle

A thrilling literary novel about the inescapability of the past and the power of fiction for fans of Jeff Vandermeer and Colson Whitehead, Anyuru’s latest examines contemporary city life with a cool eye and brilliant imagination, casting its characters in a heartrending drama of possibility.

Ruth lives comfortably with her son, Em, in a house by the sea. She has a well-paying job at the Agency, a firm that creates elaborate fictions to shape public opinion. Their lives weren’t always like this. Ruth had to get Em out of Antwerp’s hopeless postal code Twenty-Seventy, the neglected neighborhood where Em’s father, Mio, was murdered when she was still pregnant. A new assignment forces her to return to the place she once called home, and she’ll need to convince old friends and family—the only people in her life who connect her to her past—to remain silent as the government demolishes it all. Amid this upheaval, Ruth discovers a golden CD with a voice on it claiming to be Mio. He is in a place called the Nothingness Section, which may be an island or just another piece of fiction. In Anyuru’s story of stories, are there any tales where Mio can end up with Ruth, raising his son by the sea?

Johannes Anyuru is a poet, novelist, and playwright. He debuted in 2003 with the critically acclaimed collection of poems Only The Gods Are New. They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears was awarded the August Prize and film rights have been acquired by Momento Film. Anyuru's work has been likened to a mix between Nobel Laureate Thomas Tranströmer and a hip-hop MC.

Nichola Smalley is a translator and lover of Swedish and Norwegian literature. In 2014 she finished her PhD exploring the use of contemporary urban vernaculars in Swedish and UK rap and literature at UCL. Her translations range from Jogo Bonito by Henrik Brandão Jönsson (Yellow Jersey Press), a Swedish book about Brazilian football, to the latest novel by Norwegian superstar Jostein Gaarder, An Unreliable Man (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).