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Absence
An elusive narrator is beguiled by a poem that returns to him in mysterious ways, echoing across the years. He recounts memories and impressions as they float fleetingly to the surface of his an eccentric and beloved schoolteacher leaves behind a dark secret after his death; a woman lays the table for a son she knows will never return home; a young man, the pariah of his family, finds solidarity and the distant call of freedom in the letters of an estranged Aunt; a black and white photograph tells of another family, afflicted with generations of tragedy.
These are some of the people and stories that haunt the pages of Absence. This hypnotic novel is a stirring evocation of the limitless depth of the present - a symphony subtly constructed out of the murmurs, memories and phantoms that add up to an ordinary human life.
These are some of the people and stories that haunt the pages of Absence. This hypnotic novel is a stirring evocation of the limitless depth of the present - a symphony subtly constructed out of the murmurs, memories and phantoms that add up to an ordinary human life.
166 pages, Paperback
Published July 15, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews
July 30, 2025
Imagine memory like a cloud. It holds no specific shape but constantly shifts, evolving with us as we grow. Our memories are not mirrors reflecting back to us our experiences of the world, but rather memories are like windows through which we experience everything that comes after.
Issa Quincy mines the rich and intensely personal experiences of an individual life through the memories of his unnamed narrator. This is a profound and skillful debut that blew me away; one that compelled me to start reading it all over again the minute I turned the very last page.
In each section of this novel the wisps of a memory emerge from the fog of the narrator's existence, often spurred by the appearance of an object or spontaneous memory of a conversation with an old acquaintance. The narrator leads us down the rabbit trail of these memories, sometimes even nesting memories within memories for a multilayered and archaeological dig into the things we remember and the things we forget. He excavates the past, watching memories blow in and out like sand across the surface of a long forgotten structure, hollowed out but not completely lifeless.
We begin with the narrator recalling a poem from a small yellow book his mother would read to him as a child. That poem will appear again to him throughout his life creating tentpole moments around which his narrative circles. Conversations with a Boston bus driver, an Indian landlord in London, a childhood teacher, and the family friend of his godfather are woven together into a tale that spans decades of his life but feels as though we are experiencing it all as a flip-through of a family photo album.
Quincy's prose calls to mind the nostalgic atmosphere of many of Ishiguro's work. He has the ability to lead you down long, winding sentences that circle back on themselves in a way that feels revelatory, not repetitive. I read and re-read sentences for their sheer beauty, but also because, especially on re-read, certain elements, phrases, or asides seemed to connect and reveal their deeper meaning on closer inspection. It's subtly sophisticated--a book that you can read in one big gulp, but then go back to like poetry and absorb slowly.
There are too many quotes for me to put here, so just trust me when I say that Issa Quincy can WRITE. I tabbed and underlined in this 144 page book more than some twice or three times its length. Fans of reflective, interior writing will LOVE this one.
If this is Quincy's debut I can only imagine where he will go from here. This is absolutely one of, if not THE, best books I've read this year. It's a staggeringly beautiful reminder that life is both long and short, that our memories and experiences will fade, but as long as we exist in the head of another person we live on in some way.
Issa Quincy mines the rich and intensely personal experiences of an individual life through the memories of his unnamed narrator. This is a profound and skillful debut that blew me away; one that compelled me to start reading it all over again the minute I turned the very last page.
In each section of this novel the wisps of a memory emerge from the fog of the narrator's existence, often spurred by the appearance of an object or spontaneous memory of a conversation with an old acquaintance. The narrator leads us down the rabbit trail of these memories, sometimes even nesting memories within memories for a multilayered and archaeological dig into the things we remember and the things we forget. He excavates the past, watching memories blow in and out like sand across the surface of a long forgotten structure, hollowed out but not completely lifeless.
We begin with the narrator recalling a poem from a small yellow book his mother would read to him as a child. That poem will appear again to him throughout his life creating tentpole moments around which his narrative circles. Conversations with a Boston bus driver, an Indian landlord in London, a childhood teacher, and the family friend of his godfather are woven together into a tale that spans decades of his life but feels as though we are experiencing it all as a flip-through of a family photo album.
Quincy's prose calls to mind the nostalgic atmosphere of many of Ishiguro's work. He has the ability to lead you down long, winding sentences that circle back on themselves in a way that feels revelatory, not repetitive. I read and re-read sentences for their sheer beauty, but also because, especially on re-read, certain elements, phrases, or asides seemed to connect and reveal their deeper meaning on closer inspection. It's subtly sophisticated--a book that you can read in one big gulp, but then go back to like poetry and absorb slowly.
There are too many quotes for me to put here, so just trust me when I say that Issa Quincy can WRITE. I tabbed and underlined in this 144 page book more than some twice or three times its length. Fans of reflective, interior writing will LOVE this one.
If this is Quincy's debut I can only imagine where he will go from here. This is absolutely one of, if not THE, best books I've read this year. It's a staggeringly beautiful reminder that life is both long and short, that our memories and experiences will fade, but as long as we exist in the head of another person we live on in some way.
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June 22, 2025A man is searching to find the traces of himself in the stories of others; to recover forgotten memories and the sides of his self he might not consciously aware of. All of this in the context of the history happening to the wider global world.W.G. Sebald was a trailblazer for this type of fiction. Many has followed. The author seems to join the tribe with this book.
The novel contains fewer than a dozen of relatively independent 'episodes'. Each episode is composed with stories within the stories, nested narrators occasionally more than two steps removed from the main events of an episode and of course the listeners. The main narrator, our protagonist, does not talk much himself and unites them all. This technique, also used by Sebald, is quite difficult to carry out with elegance. Initially carried away by the relative fluency of the narration, i have not appreciated this difficulty here. Or rather, i could not quite specify what was the cause of my lack of enthusiasm for the narrative style.
But so happened that I’ve interrupted reading this novel to read Into the light, a new story by Rachel Cusk just published in Yale review (recommended for the fans of her recent books). She often uses this technique as well and this short story is not an exception. But Cusk does it effortlessly and elegantly. She does not have a formal separation of her imbedded narratives instead managing to create an authentic feeling of a polyphony of the carefully voiced layers akin mixing a few musical instruments into the same composition. In this novel the author is using simple italics in majority of cases to separate his internal narrators. The tool seems to be quite blunt in comparison and it does not always allow the pieces to blend into the whole of the text in the same measure.
However, the writing itself is of a high, almost meditative quality. The sentences are sparse and poetic. And the stories are moving. Also there is this kind of unwordiness (have a just made a word?) in the text: the feeling of some elusive presence, a shadow cast into the words by an essence beyond that verbal reality. The presence emanating through the absence. Can it be that the title of the novel stems from this feeling somehow? This has reminded me of a line by Mirza Ghalib, an Urdu poet: ‘The absent of the absent: what we see is merest seeming. It is the dream into which we awaken from dreaming.’. It is rare that i happen to have this feeling while reading a piece of prose. Maybe Lispector comes to mind. However I experience such an unworldly presence more often with reading a poetry or looking at a painting. Maybe this is explained by the fact that the author is the poet as well. On occasion, some fragments of the text were like poems in prose. This one i loved:
The novel contains fewer than a dozen of relatively independent 'episodes'. Each episode is composed with stories within the stories, nested narrators occasionally more than two steps removed from the main events of an episode and of course the listeners. The main narrator, our protagonist, does not talk much himself and unites them all. This technique, also used by Sebald, is quite difficult to carry out with elegance. Initially carried away by the relative fluency of the narration, i have not appreciated this difficulty here. Or rather, i could not quite specify what was the cause of my lack of enthusiasm for the narrative style.
But so happened that I’ve interrupted reading this novel to read Into the light, a new story by Rachel Cusk just published in Yale review (recommended for the fans of her recent books). She often uses this technique as well and this short story is not an exception. But Cusk does it effortlessly and elegantly. She does not have a formal separation of her imbedded narratives instead managing to create an authentic feeling of a polyphony of the carefully voiced layers akin mixing a few musical instruments into the same composition. In this novel the author is using simple italics in majority of cases to separate his internal narrators. The tool seems to be quite blunt in comparison and it does not always allow the pieces to blend into the whole of the text in the same measure.
However, the writing itself is of a high, almost meditative quality. The sentences are sparse and poetic. And the stories are moving. Also there is this kind of unwordiness (have a just made a word?) in the text: the feeling of some elusive presence, a shadow cast into the words by an essence beyond that verbal reality. The presence emanating through the absence. Can it be that the title of the novel stems from this feeling somehow? This has reminded me of a line by Mirza Ghalib, an Urdu poet: ‘The absent of the absent: what we see is merest seeming. It is the dream into which we awaken from dreaming.’. It is rare that i happen to have this feeling while reading a piece of prose. Maybe Lispector comes to mind. However I experience such an unworldly presence more often with reading a poetry or looking at a painting. Maybe this is explained by the fact that the author is the poet as well. On occasion, some fragments of the text were like poems in prose. This one i loved:
Present again, there in that space as all those thoughts: the images of my father so many years prior, the bleached and ravaged land of Tunisia and the thought of Hamed’s jacket, stitched and restitched, re-patterned and reformed, all receded into the depths of my mind and upwards from beneath time’s black water, through the unending greyness from over the whitish and shorn hills and through the mist of spring rains, I appeared but only for a short period of time before I vanished again beneath the distant and echoing words of another elsewhere.
...
In this pendulous movement, from the daintiest of threads, between
absence and presence, between voice and erasure, I am reminded of people and spaces, names and dates, all as words to which I listened. And now, like those distant and ancient spirits from the East who once moved above gardens as ghostly stewards of the birds and the trees, I am free to float back through them. Floating so silently, without ever having to utter a word. Only to inspect, once more, those who lingered on the sharp edge of a shattering scream and a heavy silence before being erased forever by the dark clouds of oblivion...
August 18, 2025
“Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point in space, the poet sees everything that happens in one point in time. Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighbouring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-grey sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur - all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair in Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus.”
~ Vladimir Nabokov in “Speak, Memory”
Butterfly-hunting Nabokov would have relished this book.
Dizzying. Atmospheric. Hypnotic. Proustian.
Do you recall the strange, overpowering vertigo you sometimes feel when sifting through old photographs or letters from strangers in an antique store? As if, for just a few seconds, you are falling through a crack in space and time, witnessing a life that is absent but most definitely present and eerily alive in your hands at that very moment?
Whose ghost will you be in one hundred years?
An unnamed narrator remembers a mysterious ballad that his mother used to read to him when he was little, growing up in England. This memory sets off a chorus of vignettes, entanglements and recollections from other characters in his life, strangers, coworkers, neighbors, friends and family, all opening and closing into each other like a delicate set of Russian dolls.
A Scheherazade-like unspooling of humanity, from all corners of the world, where the dead and the disappeared, the forgotten and the banished, the brave and the misfits are all but one thing: the absent who are never not right there, right by our side. In our memories, which we then (try to) speak.
There is simply no way I can pin this rare butterfly down.
So I’m going to let it flutter and hope you decide to try and catch it.
This is a small book of vertiginous beauty.
~ Vladimir Nabokov in “Speak, Memory”
Butterfly-hunting Nabokov would have relished this book.
Dizzying. Atmospheric. Hypnotic. Proustian.
Do you recall the strange, overpowering vertigo you sometimes feel when sifting through old photographs or letters from strangers in an antique store? As if, for just a few seconds, you are falling through a crack in space and time, witnessing a life that is absent but most definitely present and eerily alive in your hands at that very moment?
Whose ghost will you be in one hundred years?
An unnamed narrator remembers a mysterious ballad that his mother used to read to him when he was little, growing up in England. This memory sets off a chorus of vignettes, entanglements and recollections from other characters in his life, strangers, coworkers, neighbors, friends and family, all opening and closing into each other like a delicate set of Russian dolls.
A Scheherazade-like unspooling of humanity, from all corners of the world, where the dead and the disappeared, the forgotten and the banished, the brave and the misfits are all but one thing: the absent who are never not right there, right by our side. In our memories, which we then (try to) speak.
There is simply no way I can pin this rare butterfly down.
So I’m going to let it flutter and hope you decide to try and catch it.
This is a small book of vertiginous beauty.
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August 7, 2025I would need to read this entire thing again to fully understand all Quincy is pulling off here, but I feel comfortable saying this is my favorite first page of a novel I’ve ever read. It knocked me right out.
July 8, 2025
Heel mooi!!! Duidelijk dat deze auteur dichter is
August 6, 2025
Are you ever surprised by how much you love a book? Not because you doubted you would, but because how much you adore it surprises you? This is that book for me. I love it. It checks all the boxes that make a book perfect for me: the writing is strong, poetic and beautiful; the form adds interest; and it’s a simple yet layered chronicle of the weight and the joy of life.
Absence opens with the narrator reflecting on his childhood and a poem his mother read him to lull him to sleep. The main theme, as expected given the title, is absence, which is explored through memory. Quincy conveys the joy of memories, the complexity of the ones we retain and lose, and those that are hidden or we are unaware of until something brings them into our consciousness. I love the way Quincy captures how erratically memories come to us; often with no rhyme or reason or completely out of context. I also love how Quincy explored how absence can often be a catalyst for connecting with others.
The narrative felt slow, methodical, and deliberate. The writing is beautiful in a way that the emotion seeps from the page, depicting the weight of being human, the ache of memory and loss, connections made and severed, and of people on the fringe. I appreciate how Quincy uses form to add depth to this work; moving back and forth in time, italics to denote different voices, and letters. He also leaves things unresolved, raising questions that go unanswered and giving the reader a more active role in the experience by allowing them to draw their own conclusions.
There is a bit of a “six degrees of separation” vibe as unexpected connections are exposed. Some readers may shrug off the connections and coincidences as too contrived or convenient. Not me. I believe our existence is intertwined in ways just outside our field of vision, there but rarely witnessed, and Quincy brings them out into the light while conveying the heartbreak of missing them.
I love this book and strongly recommend it. I’m certain it will be one of my top reads this year. Thank you Two Dollar Radio for the #gifted ARC.
Absence opens with the narrator reflecting on his childhood and a poem his mother read him to lull him to sleep. The main theme, as expected given the title, is absence, which is explored through memory. Quincy conveys the joy of memories, the complexity of the ones we retain and lose, and those that are hidden or we are unaware of until something brings them into our consciousness. I love the way Quincy captures how erratically memories come to us; often with no rhyme or reason or completely out of context. I also love how Quincy explored how absence can often be a catalyst for connecting with others.
The narrative felt slow, methodical, and deliberate. The writing is beautiful in a way that the emotion seeps from the page, depicting the weight of being human, the ache of memory and loss, connections made and severed, and of people on the fringe. I appreciate how Quincy uses form to add depth to this work; moving back and forth in time, italics to denote different voices, and letters. He also leaves things unresolved, raising questions that go unanswered and giving the reader a more active role in the experience by allowing them to draw their own conclusions.
There is a bit of a “six degrees of separation” vibe as unexpected connections are exposed. Some readers may shrug off the connections and coincidences as too contrived or convenient. Not me. I believe our existence is intertwined in ways just outside our field of vision, there but rarely witnessed, and Quincy brings them out into the light while conveying the heartbreak of missing them.
I love this book and strongly recommend it. I’m certain it will be one of my top reads this year. Thank you Two Dollar Radio for the #gifted ARC.
July 2, 2025
“I have thought about it and see how all my memory is eaten away and ravaged not by what I've forgotten but what I've remembered. What I want to know about is that which seems gone now. And what is there is of no use to me.”
A beautifully written meditation on what lingers after relationships both with those we only meet fleetingly and with loved ones long after they’re gone and the unexpected connections and commonalities that tie those disparate people and places together.
A beautifully written meditation on what lingers after relationships both with those we only meet fleetingly and with loved ones long after they’re gone and the unexpected connections and commonalities that tie those disparate people and places together.
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September 28, 2025this was an okay read for me- the first couple of chapters (they’re more like short stories with the same narrator) i was invested but something happened midway and finishing was a bit of a slog. beautiful writing, but i personally couldn’t fully connect with it.
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June 30, 2025The use of the word “sat” instead of “sitting” is colloquial English used in the UK for those who are too ignorant to know that.
November 29, 2025
Il titolo non mente, la fa da protagonista proprio l'assenza che permane nel linguaggio, in un luogo o in un'abitudine quando si viene inevitabilmente contaminati dal contatti con un'altra assenza, in una rete di sradicamenti e non detti che travalica le epoche, le nazioni e le persone, e Issa Quincy è bravo a mostrarne l'universalità in questo libro.
Probably nelle corde di chi ha apprezzato The White book di Han Kang.
Probably nelle corde di chi ha apprezzato The White book di Han Kang.
May 12, 2025
Also found the insistence on using “sat” instead of “sitting” so forced
November 17, 2025
A favourite read of the year. I’ve not seen many people talk about this, and it didn’t appear to have much publicity at the time of its release, but I hope the paperback publication sees it make its way into many more readers’ hands as this was so beautifully and skilfully crafted. Gathering a collection of connections and relationships from over the course of his life, no matter their longevity or lack thereof, and ruminating on their impact on his life, the narrator attempts to piece together parts of himself and an idea of home. I adored the characterisation and significance of the poem the narrator’s mother read to him as a child; the way it reoccurred throughout was always unexpected but never unwelcome. The coincidences and connections that we can find within different people and in different places our entire lives, is such a heartwarming message even when displayed amongst struggles and hardships. A thread of grief runs throughout but this book is not without hope or beauty. In time, I hope to read more from Quincy.
October 11, 2025
Absence was not on my radar until a bookstagrammer I follow raved about it. I appreciated the storytelling and the ways in which little snippets of life can transport us to childhood memories, but this was overall just an ok read to me. Each chapter felt too disjointed from the others. It was more like a collection of short stories that connected but only barely. I also got lost at times because the stories frequently were told by another person about another person. I kept having to re-trace who was who and how they connected to the main protagonist.
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October 9, 2025Either I’m not smart enough to unpack what this book is doing, or my brain cannot handle the heavily descriptive and (to me) complicated writing in this wildly chaotic time of my life. I wanted a book that would reflect my own feelings of how memories are elusive in grief, but I was just left frustrated by much of this writing.
August 14, 2025
Absence is a portrait of lives connected by memory, poetry, and tragedy.
It follows an unnamed narrator whose childhood poem, read to him by his mother, reappears in the stories of a range of characters he meets, each with their own secret.
The writing is poetic but never overwrought and combines nostalgia with philosophical insight. It’s an atmospheric and thoughtful debut that you should definitely consider reading.
It follows an unnamed narrator whose childhood poem, read to him by his mother, reappears in the stories of a range of characters he meets, each with their own secret.
The writing is poetic but never overwrought and combines nostalgia with philosophical insight. It’s an atmospheric and thoughtful debut that you should definitely consider reading.
June 15, 2025
A multilayered exploration of memory; its fragility, its power. Interwoven strands that link lives told through stories told of stories told… beautiful written although sometimes with a touch too much effort
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July 15, 2025BOOKER PRIZE PREDICTION READINGS #1
A novella (short story collection? I don’t know) about curiosity and reflection. The stories(?) were hit and miss, but the ones that were a hit I enjoyed, but were too short. The first story is about a teacher and his life out of school that shocks one of his now-grown students; I could have taken a full novel for that one. That’s really the only one that stuck out to me as a whole. I wonder if this would make it on the longlist or if it’s even being consider. I think it might be a bit too floaty for the prize (but here again Held was on the list last year.) overall shallow and predictable.
A novella (short story collection? I don’t know) about curiosity and reflection. The stories(?) were hit and miss, but the ones that were a hit I enjoyed, but were too short. The first story is about a teacher and his life out of school that shocks one of his now-grown students; I could have taken a full novel for that one. That’s really the only one that stuck out to me as a whole. I wonder if this would make it on the longlist or if it’s even being consider. I think it might be a bit too floaty for the prize (but here again Held was on the list last year.) overall shallow and predictable.
September 21, 2025
En sån där bok som alldeles självklart hamnar på ett gäng läsa-listor (inklusive Obamas). Och en som en därför självklart plockar upp. Därtill en sån en självklart fortsätter läsa för att språket kräver det.
Men som inte självklart är bra.
Eller, det finns säkert geniala saker här. Det poetiska, i minnena, i tomrummen mellan både minnen och ord; Avsaknader.
Men för mig blir den största avsaknaden den av dialog. Jag har svårt för återberättande texter som det är - här är det personer som återberättar andra personers återberättelser. Med följden att det finns en enorm distans till varenda karaktär och känsla.
Stjärnorna är för språket, inget annat.
Men som inte självklart är bra.
Eller, det finns säkert geniala saker här. Det poetiska, i minnena, i tomrummen mellan både minnen och ord; Avsaknader.
Men för mig blir den största avsaknaden den av dialog. Jag har svårt för återberättande texter som det är - här är det personer som återberättar andra personers återberättelser. Med följden att det finns en enorm distans till varenda karaktär och känsla.
Stjärnorna är för språket, inget annat.
December 5, 2025
While the fragments nature of memory is so beautifully gathered in this series of vignettes, the focus on the trauma and the death and the despair and silence of it all seems a little darker than need be. There is beauty in the darkness but so little! I finished it with a sense of hopelessness to heal from traumas that are horrendous in some cases but also very likely to occur in others like the death of a parent. Are we bound forever in fractured healing from the living of life? Is this not just one side of the coin - the other side being an endless joy in everything around us?
Obviously very well written if it’s made me so upset!
Obviously very well written if it’s made me so upset!
September 26, 2025
Absence is a delicate meditation on memory and loss, where each story unfolds like an echo of other absences.
“The dead never leave you. They remain, strangely and beautifully, sometimes horrifyingly, always surfacing, again and again above time’s rising black water.”
“She, from then, would live in that strange position I have found so many of us having lived – pressed between a piercing howl and an irreversible silence.”
“It was an understanding that the knowable would forever remain unknowable and the sayable would forever remain pale, ghostlike, evasive.”
“The dead never leave you. They remain, strangely and beautifully, sometimes horrifyingly, always surfacing, again and again above time’s rising black water.”
“She, from then, would live in that strange position I have found so many of us having lived – pressed between a piercing howl and an irreversible silence.”
“It was an understanding that the knowable would forever remain unknowable and the sayable would forever remain pale, ghostlike, evasive.”
October 5, 2025
I absolutely loved reading this book 👌🏽👌🏽at first I was worried thinking it was poetry ( I am not a particularly fond of poetry) but to my surprise it was a brilliantly written novel 👏🏽👏🏽his very first and goodness Issa Quincy is a great storyteller 🙌🏽🙌🏽definitely looking forward to more of his books ❤️❤️10/10
He manage to capture the absence of something in your life in such a profound way. As you read you relate to each encounter and experience what that absence means to the story. I am absolutely love it.
He manage to capture the absence of something in your life in such a profound way. As you read you relate to each encounter and experience what that absence means to the story. I am absolutely love it.
November 14, 2025
I read this for my creative writing class and i am blown away, this novel is poetically devastating and beautifully human.i am also blessed that i got to hear issa quincy speak about his novel and im blown away. What is our life and who will hear us. What do we share and what do we keep out? How does our loses affect our present and how do we move with our future? what do we do with the stories we experience and hear. our life is subjective and so is our experiences.
November 25, 2025
There seems to be a lot happening in the book, but the writing and narratives within narratives was great.
I enjoyed it, however felt a bit like a fever dream.
The writing around memories was profound.
I enjoyed it, however felt a bit like a fever dream.
The writing around memories was profound.
June 18, 2025
Creative and imaginative but not enthralling all the way through
August 21, 2025
Such quiet beauty in watching strangers.
August 26, 2025
entrancing prose which underlines the beauty of transience etched throughout - yet i still found my mind wandered and wouldn’t pull back into reading this
October 1, 2025
Thematically connected vignettes about life and the human condition. Rich, poetic prose.
November 5, 2025
Jedna od onih knjiga koja te mora nać u pravom trenutku, nekad drugo možda mi bude bolja, ovaj put sam se dosta mučila
November 9, 2025
Pleasantly surprised by this beautiful and lyrical meditation on memory.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews