Author: Lai, Christine

Price: $15.23

Category:Historical Fiction
Publication Date:2023-09-12T00:00:01Z
Pages:230
Binding:Hardcover
ISBN:10:1953387381
ISBN:13:9781953387387
An entrancing and prismatic debut novel by Christine Lai, set in a near future fraught with ecological collapse, Landscapes brilliantly explores memory, empathy, preservation, and art as an instrument for recollection and renewal. In the English countryside--decimated by heat and drought, earthquakes and floods--Penelope archives what remains of an estate's once notable collection. As she catalogs the library's contents, she keeps a diary of her final months in the dilapidated country house that has been her home for two decades and a refuge for those who have been displaced by disasters. Out of necessity, Penelope and her partner, Aidan, have sold the house and with its scheduled demolition comes this pressing task of completing the archive. But with it also comes the impending arrival of Aidan's brother, Julian, who will return to have one final look at his childhood home. During a brief but violent relationship twenty-two years before, Penelope suffered at the hands of Julian, and as his visit looms, she finds herself unable to suppress the past in her efforts to build a possible, if uncertain, future. In this elegiac and spellbinding blend of narrative, essay, and diary, Penelope clings to art as a means of understanding, of survival, and of reckoning. Recalling the works of Rachel Cusk and Kazuo Ishiguro, Landscapes is an evocative reinvention of the pastoral and the country house novel for our age of catastrophe, and announces the arrival of an extraordinarily gifted new writer.