Showing results by author "Katherine Brabon" in All Categories

From the acclaimed author of The Memory Artist and The Shut Ins comes a new novel about the relationship between body and self, and how we must dive beneath the surface to really know ourselves.

Pasha Ivanov is a child of the Freeze, born in Moscow during Brezhnev's repressive rule. Night after night his parents and their friends gather to preserve the memory of terrifying Stalinist violence and to expose the continued harassment of dissidents. When Gorbachev promises glasnost, openness, 24-year-old Pasha longs to create art and to carry on the work of those who came before him. His search to find meaning leads him to assemble a fractured story of Russia's traumatic past.

Mai and Hikaru went to school together in the city of Nagoya, until Hikaru disappeared when they were 18. It is not until 10 years later, when Mai runs into Hikaru's mother, Hiromi Sato, that she learns Hikaru has become a hikikomori, a recluse unable to leave his bedroom for years. In secret, Hiromi Sato hires Mai as a 'rental sister', to write letters to Hikaru and encourage him to leave his room.

In the wake of a major operation, a twenty-eight-year-old woman with chronic illness has twelve weeks to heal, or rather, to acclimate to her new body and prepare herself to leave the routines, comforts, and interiority of her convalescence. In the hydrotherapy pool, she meets Frida, a young woman who looks strikingly similar to her and is also in a state of recovery. But Frida sees her chronic illness as something to overcome and her body as something to control. She adores the pool and pushes the herself toward an active life, relentlessly pursuing the prevailing narrative of illness.