Strangers at the Port

A TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

'This novel amazed me. It is the work of a true original' LUCIE ELVEN

'I loved Strangers at the Port. It is deliciously spare, yet complex - a story of the past as well as a vision of the future' SARA BAUME

Giulia is ten. She lives on the greenest island in a volcanic archipelago. She has never left.

Her best friend, beside her older sister, Giovanna, is a donkey. She ties ribbons around his head and thinks she will marry him when the time comes.

The sisters' days on the island are shaped by ritual, community, superstition and isolation.

It is a place that feels stuck in time: verdant, plentiful, peaceful.

Until the men arrive.

And a foreign yacht anchors at the port.

And the vines begin to fail.

And everything changes.

From the author of Dolores, Strangers at the Port is an exquisite, enchanted, atmospheric novel about myth and memory, suspicion and dislocation, emigrants and explorers.

'Lauren Aimee Curtis brings her alchemical knack to a remote island setting, recounting a story through three vantage points. Giulia and Giovanna's acidic, beguiling accounts of their island's rituals and lore contrast with a third teller whose logbooks fragment into feverish autobiography. Curtis's radiant novel explores the ineffable dimensions of a place, of the past, of a person, which is precisely what I come to literature for' MIREILLE JUCHAU

Curtis - who was included on Granta's recent Best of Young British Novelists list - writes dazzlingly confident prose, too rich to be called spare yet without any superfluous weight. She writes the island as if she were Celine Sciamma shooting Portrait of a Lady on Fire -- Francesca Peacock TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
An incredible novel about how the quiet, ritualistic lives of a pair sisters are shaken by the arrival of strangers on their island -- Anna Bonet THE I PAPER
Strangers at the Port is both a fascinating delve into the small, personal stories sacrificed to the grander sweep of history and a provocative creation of a fable for our times -- Emily Rhodes THE SPECTATOR
Lushly poetic -- Lucy Thynne LITERARY REVIEW
Curtis's writing is beautiful GOOD READING
Reading this wonderfully oblique historical tale is a little like looking at the way light refracts through a prism: its meanings and impressions disperse along its journey to reveal what the author herself has termed 'the slippery overlap between history, fiction and memory' . . . Fascinating -- Catherine Jarvie MARIE CLAIRE, Best Books of 2023
Magnificent -- Cal Revely-Calder TELEGRAPH REVIEW, Books of the Year
Stubbornly enigmatic SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, Books of the Year
A mesmeric and lyrical novel about a fictive island and its inhabitants, which eschews narrative convention in favour of something more elusive, fractured, and choral . . . truly original -- Ralf Webb GRANTA, Books of the Year

Lauren Aimee Curtis was born in Sydney. Her first book, Dolores, was shortlisted for the Readings Prize, the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing, and was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year. She has written for Granta, The White Review and Sydney Review of Books, among other publications. In 2023, she was named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists.

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