Description
Book Synopsis'A brilliant and beautiful book which wrestles with the scope and ache of lineage, the origin and myth and making of ourselves' - Rachel Long, author of My Darling from the Lions 'Unlike almost anything I've read - so alive it seems to squirm to the touch' - Will Harris, author of RENDANG, winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection What does it mean to be a person of multitudinous countries and heritages? Amnion excavates migratory histories, colonialism and class, moving from England to France, the United States, Spain, Germany, Libya and the Philippines. In this chronicle of a family's history divided by geography and language, Stephanie Sy-Quia explores the reverberations that the actions of one generation can have on the next, through acts of bravery and resistance, great and small. Simultaneously mapping and undoing ideas of the self, everything here is contested. Undefinable in form, combining aspects of fiction, epic poetry and the lyric essay, and merging classical thought and contemporary life to show the joy in living and art, Amnion's broad intellect and undulating emotional landscape is a testament to the families we are given and those that we choose. A POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION 'Kaleidoscopic... A powerful, hybrid song charged with ferocity and fragility' - the Guardian
Trade ReviewAmnion is unlike almost anything I've read - so alive it seems to squirm to the touch. Couched as biography - with numerous family stories unspooling through time - it resists neat threads, continually unravelling and questioning itself [...] Here a non-white female artist comes of age, taking the European tradition and reshaping it to fit a polyglot, postcolonial experience. -- Will Harris, author of RENDANG
A brilliant and beautiful book which wrestles with the scope and ache of lineage, the origin and myth and making of ourselves. -- Rachel Long, author of My Darling from the Lions
Sy-Quia's bold Künstlerroman mesmerisingly transports us across continents and through the longing of diasporas, arriving in England, a "deep bone-knowing country/Albion -- Sandeep Parmar, Books of the Year * New Statesman *
Rich and fluid... brightened by a charming, breezy sense of humour * TLS *
