Dark Neighourhood by Vanessa Onwuemezi

₱1,020.00

In her brilliantly inventive debut collection, Vanessa Onwuemezi takes readers on a surreal and haunting journey through a landscape on the edge of time. At the border with another world, a line of people wait for the gates to open; on the floor of a lonely room, a Born Winner runs through his life’s achievements and losses; in a suburban garden, a man witnesses a murder that pushes him out into the community. Struggling to realize the human ideals of love and freedom, the characters of Dark Neighbourhood roam instead the depths of alienation, loss and shame. With a detached eye and hallucinatory vision, they observe their own worlds as the line between dream and reality dissolves and they themselves begin to fragment. Electrifying and heady, and written with a masterful lyrical precision, Dark Neighbourhood heralds the arrival of a strikingly original new voice in fiction.

REVIEWS

‘[A] beautiful, vertiginous and enriching first collection ... there is a folkloric power in the way Onwuemezi combines clarity and mystery, evoked in a dramatic, memorable soundworld.’— David Hayden, Guardian

‘Onwuemezi conjures nightmarish urban landscapes that swallow their protagonists. Each story in the book is like a window in an apartment block: lonely squares of light in the dark …The stakes are surreal but precipitously high, which is all that matters really. When you fall from the heights of heaven, you’ll hit the ground with a thud.’
- Telegraph

‘Dark Neighbourhood has arrived with a bang. It’s Gothic and mesmerising, but not so fantastical that the struggles within don’t have a fearful glint of familiarity, making for a chilling, lush autumnal read.’—Scotsman

PRODUCT DETAILS
French paperback with flaps
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
ISBN: 978-1913097707
Pages: 160