Strangers At The Port Av Lauren Aimee Curtis

<p><b>A TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023</b><br><br>''This novel amazed me. It is the work of a true original''<b> LUCIE ELVEN</b><br>''I loved<i> Strangers at the Port</i>. It is deliciously spare, yet complex - a story of the past as well as a vision of the future''<b> SARA BAUME</b><br><br>Giulia is ten. She lives on the greenest island in a volcanic archipelago. She has never left.<br><br>Her best friend, beside her older sister, Giovanna, is a donkey. She ties ribbons around his head and thinks she will marry him when the time comes.<br><br>The sisters'' days on the island are shaped by ritual, community, superstition and isolation.<br><br>It is a place that feels stuck in time: verdant, plentiful, peaceful.<br><br>Until the men arrive.<br><br>And a foreign yacht anchors at the port.<br><br>And the vines begin to fail.<br><br>And everything changes.<br><br>From the author of <i>Dolores</i>, <i>Strangers at the Port</i> is an exquisite, enchanted, atmospheric novel about myth and memory, suspicion and dislocation, emigrants and explorers.<br><br><b>''Lauren Aimee Curtis brings her alchemical knack to a remote island setting, recounting a story through three vantage points. Giulia and Giovanna''s acidic, beguiling accounts of their island''s rituals and lore contrast with a third teller whose logbooks fragment into feverish autobiography. Curtis''s radiant novel explores the ineffable dimensions of a place, of the past, of a person, which is precisely what I come to literature for'' MIREILLE JUCHAU</b></p>