Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking
Han Smith
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From the publisher
An experimental, daring debut about a young woman who comes of age in a town that is reckoning with its past, for readers of Milkman and A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.
'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
'Insightful, affecting and assured . . . Written with a poetry as defamiliarising as it is rich' OISÍN FAGAN
'Strange, intriguing, exhilarating' CAMILLA GRUDOVA
'Extraordinary' ADAM ZMITH
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.