Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking
A John Murray Original
Format:Paperback
Publisher:John Murray Press
Published:20th Jun '24
Should be back in stock very soon
![Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking cover](https://cdn.theportobellobookshop.com/img/9781399814256.jpg)
'Kaleidoscopic and beguiling . . . A singular and thrilling debut that shows what happens when objective truth and meaning are drowned in the shifting river of history and politics' ANDREW McMILLAN
'A novel full of hopeful glitter - and one I know I will return to' A K Blakemore, Guardian
'Insightful, affecting and assured . . . Written with a poetry as defamiliarising as it is rich' OISÍN FAGAN
'Strange, intriguing, exhilarating' CAMILLA GRUDOVA
The almost daughter is almost normal, because she knows how to know and also not know.
She knows and does not know, for instance, about the barracks by the athletics field, and about the lonely woman she visits each week. She knows - almost - about ghosts, and their ghosts, and she knows not to have questions about them. She knows to focus on being a woman: on training her body and dreaming only of escape.
Then, the almost daughter meets Oksana. Oksana is not even almost normal, and the questions she has are not normal at all.
Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking is the story of a young woman coming of age in a town reckoning with its brutal past, for readers of Milkman and A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.
Intimate, intricate, and ultimately irresistible. Smith's unforgettable style builds a political-personal narrative that resounds to the drumbeat of resistance and rebellion
-- RUBY COWLINGLike being in a hall of mirrors where you think you've caught Smith's eye but it's just a reflection. When something slips into view between the glass, you get that uncanny feeling you're staring back at yourself. A mysterious quest of excavation -- JEN CALLEJA
Arrests and intrigues . . . an extraordinary achievement -- ADAM Z
ISBN: 9781399814256
Dimensions: 214mm x 134mm x 30mm
Weight: 340g
320 pages