Strangers at the Port: From one of Grantas Best of Young British Novelists

(Paperback)

Available Formats

---

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

'This novel amazed me. It is the work of a true original' LUCIE ELVEN

'I loved Strangers at the Port. It is deliciously spare, yet complex - a story of the past as well as a vision of the future' SARA BAUME

Giulia is ten. She lives on the greenest island in a volcanic archipelago. She has never left.

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.

The sisters' days on the island are shaped by ritual, community, superstition and isolation.

It is a place that feels stuck in time: verdant, plentiful, peaceful.

Until the men arrive. And a foreign yacht anchors at the port. And the vines begin to fail. And everything changes.

From the author of Dolores, Strangers at the Port is an exquisite, enchanted, atmospheric novel about myth and memory, suspicion and dislocation, emigrants and explorers.

'Lauren Aimee Curtis brings her alchemical knack to a remote island setting, recounting a story through three vantage points. 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

Reviews

An incredible novel about how the quiet, ritualistic lives of a pair sisters are shaken by the arrival of strangers on their island. -- Anna Bonet * THE I PAPER *
Vivid... Curtis's promise is evident. -- Sarah Moss * GUARDIAN *
Strangers at the Port is both a fascinating delve into the small, personal stories sacrificed to the grander sweep of history and a provocative creation of a fable for our times. -- Emily Rhodes * THE SPECTATOR *
Curtis - who was included on Granta's recent Best of Young British Novelists list - writes dazzlingly confident prose, too rich to be called spare yet without any superfluous weight. She writes the island as if she were Celine Sciamma shooting Portrait of a Lady on Fire. -- Francesca Peacock * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *
Lushly poetic -- Lucy Thynne * LITERARY REVIEW *
Curtis's writing is beautiful * Good Reading *
Reading this wonderfully oblique historical tale is a little like looking at the way light refracts through a prism: its meanings and impressions disperse along its journey to reveal what the author herself has termed 'the slippery overlap between history, fiction and memory'... Fascinating. -- Catherine Jarvie * MARIE CLAIRE, Best Books of 2023 *

Author Bio

Lauren Aimee Curtis was born in Sydney. Her first book, Dolores, was shortlisted for the Readings Prize, the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing, and was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year. She has written for Granta, The White Review and Sydney Review of Books, among other publications. In 2023, she was named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists.