Overview

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?

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9781949641691

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Reviews

"""Tender and tense...a reflective novel about the dangerous allure and empowering vindication of using fiction to cope with reality."" --Foreword Reviews (starred review) Praise for They Will Drown in Their Mother's Tears ""[They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears] has a powerful emotional core... Anyuru's ability to imagine a thread connecting present-day exclusion to future atrocities makes this more than a genre entertainment. He has written a ""state of the nation"" novel for a country that seems to be losing faith in the civic values for which it is internationally admired."" --Hari Kunzru, New York Times ""Anyuru underscores the reality that even parallel worlds involve global connections... Each of his characters feels real, whether experiencing friendship and delight or torture and death."" --NPR ""It's a rare author who has such sensitivity with explosive materials...Saskia Vogel's translation achieves a difficult balance, nimble yet compassionate. She captures Annika's mash-up of Western slang and Koranic Arabic, its humor often a relief, and also the more complex contemplations of the writer, poetic and touching...I came away thinking of the book as an attempt to forge a more humane means of expression, one that could surmount all our fears and failures."" --Washington Post ""An ingeniously plotted work...Anyuru's dystopia persuades because it is inextricable from the anxieties of his Muslim characters in contemporary Sweden, from disaffected youths who sell hash and flirt with radicalism to imams preaching forbearance in cramped basement mosques. The grammar of their faith, from its rituals of prayer to its reassurances of eternity, offers a means of orientation beyond precarious circumstances--as well as a counterpoint to the nativist equation of birthplace and belonging."" --Harper's Magazine ""[Anyuru]. . . turns a novel about terrorism, time travel and alternative realities into something even stranger than those things: a philosophical meditation on hope."" --San Francisco Chronicle"

"Praise for They Will Drown in Their Mother's Tears ""[They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears] has a powerful emotional core... Anyuru's ability to imagine a thread connecting present-day exclusion to future atrocities makes this more than a genre entertainment. He has written a ""state of the nation"" novel for a country that seems to be losing faith in the civic values for which it is internationally admired."" --Hari Kunzru, New York Times ""Anyuru underscores the reality that even parallel worlds involve global connections... Each of his characters feels real, whether experiencing friendship and delight or torture and death."" --NPR ""It's a rare author who has such sensitivity with explosive materials...Saskia Vogel's translation achieves a difficult balance, nimble yet compassionate. She captures Annika's mash-up of Western slang and Koranic Arabic, its humor often a relief, and also the more complex contemplations of the writer, poetic and touching...I came away thinking of the book as an attempt to forge a more humane means of expression, one that could surmount all our fears and failures."" --Washington Post ""An ingeniously plotted work...Anyuru's dystopia persuades because it is inextricable from the anxieties of his Muslim characters in contemporary Sweden, from disaffected youths who sell hash and flirt with radicalism to imams preaching forbearance in cramped basement mosques. The grammar of their faith, from its rituals of prayer to its reassurances of eternity, offers a means of orientation beyond precarious circumstances--as well as a counterpoint to the nativist equation of birthplace and belonging."" --Harper's Magazine ""[Anyuru]. . . turns a novel about terrorism, time travel and alternative realities into something even stranger than those things: a philosophical meditation on hope."" --San Francisco Chronicle"

Author Information

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. A translator and lover of Swedish and Norwegian literature, Nichola Smalley is also publicist at And Other Stories and an escaped academic--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).

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