"Through its archive of narratives nestled within narratives, this exquisite novel creates a beguiling soundscape of echoes and murmurs that reverberates in the mind long after the reading. In lucid, captivating prose, Issa Quincy constructs a palimpsest composed of the fractals and losses that define the numberless strata of the past. Recalling the novels of W. G. Sebald and the films of Chris Marker, Absence is a mournful and luminous meditation on the work of remembering."
--Christine Lai, author of Landscapes
Haunting and atmospheric, Issa Quincy's Absence is an indelible nesting doll of human impression and memory.
As a child, an unnamed narrator's mother reads to him a poem. Throughout his life, the poem reappears mysteriously, in the affecting life experiences of others as they are recounted to him. An eccentric and beloved schoolteacher leaves behind a dark secret after his death. An elderly woman returns to the same hotel on the Tunisian coast every year as an act of remembrance for a disappeared brother. The son of a wealthy Indian businessman, the pariah of his family, finds solidarity and the distant pang of freedom within the letters of an estranged Aunt. As we follow characters on their journeys of self-discovery through the jungle of Thailand, as a child in the British countryside, or as an aging doctor on the island of Cyprus, Absence evocatively builds a compassionate symphony of nostalgia, attuned to the drama of everyday and the phantoms that linger with us. Issa Quincy has constructed a transcendent portrait of humanity, deftly illuminating those memories that forever bind us to one another.
