A superb work of political and existential intrigue…a coolly excellent translation by Nichola Smalley…This involving novel is situated at the point of collision between the truths we invent and those we’re born into.”
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“[An] excellent translation…[Ixelles] is a rich, strange novel that cuts at something deeply human in us—the urge to tell stories, to mythologize, to rewrite—and masterfully explores the pain and hurt of being human.”
—The Chicago Review of Books
“Anyuru has a talent for showing the seams in society’s sewing. Often, Ixelles reads like faint transmissions from uneasy, adjacent universes. There is something of Borges that runs through the novel – a child’s compendium of monsters from a role-playing game; past lives that refuse to die; the gravity of a library, that desperate wanting to be consumed by a story, by many stories at once; belonging as a matter of narrative ownership. It occurs to me that, just as so many of Borges’ characters might be said to share his fear of dying in a language they can’t understand, Anyuru’s characters often navigate the world as though gripped by a fear of dying in a culture that doesn’t understand them.”
—from the introduction by Omar El Akkad
“Ixelles is beautifully, poetically told, deeply human, entirely cynical and yet a little hopeful. Anyuru shows us the world as it is—mundane, grim, contradictory and full of people’s wishes— and offers something small, something bright, a single thread of gold running through the grey of it all.”
—The Ancillary Review of Books
“A multilayered novel blending mystery, SF, and politics in an uneasily multicultural Europe… part Borges, part Stieg Larsson, and part the P.D. James of The Children of Men.…Memorably inventive: the work of a writer, well established in Sweden, whom American readers will want to know.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Any novel that gets comped to both Jeff VanderMeer and Colson Whitehead is going to be an auto-pick-up for me. This one follows a woman who works ‘creating elaborate fictions to shape public opinion’ as she returns to her old home—where she finds a CD with the voice of someone claiming to be her dead husband. It’s giving slipstream strangeness and I’m ready for it.”
—Literary Hub (Most Anticipated Books of 2024)
“Tender and tense…a reflective novel about the dangerous allure and empowering vindication of using fiction to cope with reality.”
—Foreword Reviews (starred review)
A grim but tantalizing portrayal of Sweden…propulsive and tender.”
—Ourculture
Praise for They Will Drown in Their Mother's Tears
“[They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears] has a powerful emotional core… Anyuru’s ability to imagine a thread connecting present-day exclusion to future atrocities makes this more than a genre entertainment. He has written a “state of the nation” novel for a country that seems to be losing faith in the civic values for which it is internationally admired.”
—Hari Kunzru, New York Times
“Anyuru underscores the reality that even parallel worlds involve global connections… Each of his characters feels real, whether experiencing friendship and delight or torture and death.”
—NPR
“It’s a rare author who has such sensitivity with explosive materials…Saskia Vogel’s translation achieves a difficult balance, nimble yet compassionate. She captures Annika’s mash-up of Western slang and Koranic Arabic, its humor often a relief, and also the more complex contemplations of the writer, poetic and touching…I came away thinking of the book as an attempt to forge a more humane means of expression, one that could surmount all our fears and failures.”
—Washington Post
“An ingeniously plotted work…Anyuru’s dystopia persuades because it is inextricable from the anxieties of his Muslim characters in contemporary Sweden, from disaffected youths who sell hash and flirt with radicalism to imams preaching forbearance in cramped basement mosques. The grammar of their faith, from its rituals of prayer to its reassurances of eternity, offers a means of orientation beyond precarious circumstances—as well as a counterpoint to the nativist equation of birthplace and belonging.”
—Harper’s Magazine
“[Anyuru]. . . turns a novel about terrorism, time travel and alternative realities into something even stranger than those things: a philosophical meditation on hope.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
2024-08-17
A multilayered novel blending mystery, SF, and politics in an uneasily multicultural Europe.
“A departure hall for travelers with no destination.”Thus a banlieue of Antwerp where Ruth, a consultant in a shadowy enterprise, has deep connections she’d sooner forget. Twenty-Seventy, nicknamed Baghdad—as in, says Ruth’s late beloved, activist/writer Mio, the Baghdad that the Mongols sacked—is grim, depressed, dangerous. But it’s also a place of life, full of people whom Ruth’s firm is working to dispossess so that the place can be colonized by “a different segment of the population than the people who live there today: people with real spending power and professional careers.” Mio is not among the to-be-displaced: He is dead, either killed in a car wreck or stabbed, the choices offered to Ruth and Mio’s young son, Em, who, Telemachus-like, seeks his father’s ghost if not his father—for a mysterious CD has turned up with Mio’s voice on it, leading Ruth to think that he’s faked his death to lead a revolution from underground. “It was easy to disappear,” some emanation of Mio recounts. “As though I’d never really existed.” In a tale part Borges, part Stieg Larsson, and part the P.D. James ofThe Children of Men, Anyuru explores the nonexistence of the underclass: a famous novelist in his home country who, unrecognized, works as a custodian; a young man murdered, “as though he wasn’t really here.” Poet/novelist Anyuru, of Ugandan and Swedish parentage, populates his pages with multiethnic figures who resist erasure and amnesia in an unwelcoming Europe. If the mystery he poses never quite resolves, he presents arresting episodes that add pages to “a library of the memories and hopes of the poor.”
Memorably inventive: the work of a writer, well established in Sweden, whom American readers will want to know.
