This lesser-known publisher is now my first and favourite supplier for international fiction that diverges interestingly and refreshingly from the mainstream; having achieved global success with their translations of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, Quercus’ sense for the quirky and cutting-edge has now become their trademark.
The company’s passion for posterity over pulp is definitely evident in Anuradha Roy’s The Folded Earth, launched in January under the imprint MacLehose Press. Its setting in the remote reaches of the Himalayas immediately suggests the new perspectives this novel can convey to the reader as, seeking a fresh start, Maya chooses a settlement surrounded by these hulking mountains. Secluded, yet not isolated enough to avoid the collective threats of her past, the encroaching industrial development and the seemingly unaccountable behaviour of her fellow citizens. Provocative and thrilling, this promises to live up to expectations of Roy, who has already proved her prowess with An Atlas of Impossible Longing.
Continuing the travel trend, I’m excitedly anticipating reading Karin Altenberg’s début novel Island of Wings, another of Quercus’ rare birds, to be set free in April. Spanning not only an unfamiliar geographical landscape but also a different temporal one, it traces the tribulations of a Victorian missionary and his new wife as they arrive on an island at the margins of civilization. Closer to the eerie atmosphere of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible than to the harmonious island life of the Swiss Family Robinson, this colonial mystery augurs such haunting questions as the true fate of the natives’ vanishing children and the sanity or otherwise of each of the newlyweds. On an island, as in the mountains, no-one can hear you scream.
