The epic novel Beauty Is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humour and romance in a sweeping saga. The novel begins with the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, then a Dutch colony, at the time of World War II. The beautiful half-Dutch, half-Indonesian prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by incest, murder, bestiality, rape, insanity, monstrosity and the often vengeful undead. Kurniawan’s gleefully grotesque hyperbole functions as a scathing critique of his young nation’s troubled past: the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism; the chaotic struggle for independence; the 1965 mass murders of perhaps a million ‘Communists’, followed by three decades of Suharto’s despotic rule. Beauty Is a Wound astonishes from its opening line: ‘One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years .…’ Drawing on local sources folk tales and the all-night shadow puppet plays, with their bawdy wit and epic scope and inspired by Melville and Gogol, Kurniawan’s distinctive voice brings something luscious yet astringent to contemporary literature.
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JANE ROBERT
PRENTICE HALL INC.
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AVON BOOKS/HARPER COLLINS PUBLISHERS
SHOGUN A NOVEL OF JAPAN VOLUME 2
JAMES CLAVELL
ATHENEUM/SIMON & SCHUSTER INC.
THE SCARLET MANTLE A NOVEL OF JULIUS CAESAR
W.G. HARDY
PAN MACMILLAN PUBLISHERS LIMITED
SINS OF THE LION
ANNETTE MOTLEY
STEIN AND DAY
SUN BETWEEN THEIR FEET COLLECTED AFRICAN STORIES
DORIS LESSING
FLAMINGO/HARPER COLLINS PUBLISHERS
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PAULO COELHO
HARPER COLLINS PUBLISHERS LIMITED
The Book of Tomorrow
CECELIA AHERN
Exodus Quest
WILL ADAMS
Americanah
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
FOURTH ESTATE/HARPER COLLINS PUBLISHERS LIMITED
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