How We Are Translated
Overview
LONGLISTED FOR THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE
People say ‘I’m sorry’ all the time when it can mean both ‘I’m sorry I hurt you’ and ‘I’m sorry someone else did something I have nothing to do with’. It’s like the English language gave up on trying to find a word for sympathy which wasn’t also the word for guilt.
Swedish immigrant Kristin won’t talk about the Project growing inside her. Her Brazilian-born Scottish boyfriend Ciaran won’t speak English at all; he is trying to immerse himself in a Swedish
språkbad language bath,
to prepare for their future, whatever the fick that means. Their Edinburgh flat is starting to feel very small.
As this young couple is forced to confront the thing that they are both avoiding, they must reckon with the bigger questions of the world outside, and their places in it.
Details
- Format
- Size
- Extent
- ISBN
- RRP
- Pub date
- Rights held
- Other rights
- Hardback
- 198mm x 129mm
- 240 pages
- 9781925849950
- AUD$29.99
- 2 February 2021
- World English
- Aitken Alexander
Categories
Awards
- Longlisted for the 2021 Desmond Elliott Prize
- Shortlisted for the 2022 Australian Book Design Awards for Best Designed Literary Fiction Cover
Praise
‘How We Are Translated is the most contemporary of novels; set somehow both in the now and in the distant past; in one city that could be many cities, and in two different languages, though also in defiance of language, with as much focus on the silences between words as the words themselves. It’s a novel that maintains just the right balance of oddity, intimacy and illumination. It’s a novel that anyone interested in the future of the English novel needs to read!’
‘A novel brimming with ideas and promise.’
About the Author
Jessica Gaitán Johannesson grew up between Sweden, Colombia, and Ecuador. She’s a bookseller and an activist working for climate justice, and lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, How We Are Translated, was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize.
