The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa
Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, a masterful novel about loss and memory in the aftermath of a horrifying ecological disaster
"An exquisite, mysterious novel of mourning on a planetary scale" -- Booklist
"A work of great delicacy and seriousness. Ishizawa anchors the temporal and the ghostly with a transfixing pragmatism, and the result is a shifting, tessellated kaleidoscope of memory, architecture, history and grief." -- Jessica Au
"Missing persons and dogs, the dead and the living, are all on an even footing, interacting with equality. The multilayered intertwining of their memories saw me several times losing my perspective and growing dizzy, and the next thing I knew, I had been dragged into even deeper territory than I was expecting. This attempt to imprint upon humanity the experiences of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in a way that only a novel can achieve deserves to be highly esteemed." -- Yoko Ogawa
"A work of great delicacy and seriousness. Ishizawa anchors the temporal and the ghostly with a transfixing pragmatism, and the result is a shifting, tessellated kaleidoscope of memory, architecture, history and grief." -- Jessica Au
"Missing persons and dogs, the dead and the living, are all on an even footing, interacting with equality. The multilayered intertwining of their memories saw me several times losing my perspective and growing dizzy, and the next thing I knew, I had been dragged into even deeper territory than I was expecting. This attempt to imprint upon humanity the experiences of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in a way that only a novel can achieve deserves to be highly esteemed." -- Yoko Ogawa
Mai Ishizawa was born in 1980 in Sendai City, Japan, and currently lives in Germany. Her debut novel, The Place of Shells, won the Akutagawa Prize. Polly Barton is a writer and literary translator from the Japanese. Her translations include Butter by Asako Yuzuki and Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa. She has published two works of non-fiction, Fifty Sounds and Porn: An Oral History; What Am I, A Deer? is her debut novel.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780811237789 |
| ISBN 10 | 0811237788 |
| Title | The Place of Shells |
| Author | Mai Ishizawa |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | New Directions Publishing Corporation |
| Year published | 2025-03-18 |
| Number of pages | 160 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |