Overview

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.

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9781803512266

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Reviews

'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 '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

Author Information

Issa Quincy is a British writer. His poetry has appeared in the London Magazine and been anthologised by New Rivers Press. His fiction has appeared in Transition Magazine and the Kenyon Review. Absence is his first novel. He is currently based in New York City.

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