Ixelles by Johannes Anyuru
Ixelles by Johannes Anyuru, Nichola Smalley (translator)
English | 2024 | Fantasy
A thrilling literary novel about the inescapability of the past and the power of fiction for fans of Jeff Vandermeer and Colson Whitehead, Anyuru’s latest examines contemporary city life with a cool eye and brilliant imagination, casting its characters in a heartrending drama of possibility.
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?
