Description
Book SynopsisKintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with liquid gold, to highlight and celebrate an object's past. In this powerful and personal novella, Senka Maric uses the concept of kintsugi to interrogate ideas of illness, survival and recovery. Two months after her husband packs his bags and leaves the family home, the narrator finds a lump in her armpit. It's a discovery she's been dreading ever since her mother's breast cancer diagnosis sixteen years earlier, and one that will change her body forever. Through diagnosis, chemotherapy, and surgery, the narrator returns to those moments of her girlhood when she learnt to be ashamed of her sexuality and estranged from her body - the same body that now threatens to fall apart during her illness. Laced with a drive for life, sensuality and pleasure, Body Kintsugi is an intimate and optimistic book about a woman's relationship with her body as it breaks and is put back together.
Trade Review'A raw and moving book, written in exquisite, taut prose, which explores illness and healing through an inventive, kaleidoscopic narrative.' Sam Mills, author of Chauvo-Feminism and The Fragments of My Father; 'As a revelatory account of illness, the novel stands alongside Anne Boyer and Audre Lorde, while the sensuous intelligence of the prose, in Celia Hawkesworth's astonishing translation, reminded me of Virginia Woolf. It's a wonderful book.' Caleb Klaces, author of Fatherhood; 'A brave book written from personal experience that offers us much-needed hope in the victory of life over death' Faruk Sehic, author of Under Pressure and Quiet Flows the Una; 'The writing is intimate - patient, sensory, murky - a portrait of consciousness under duress.' Stacy Mattingly, Literary Hub; 'Nobody has written about the female body in our language like Senka Maric.' Sasa Dragojlo, Noizz; 'Gentle and combative, sad but not at all pathetic, it is an unusually strong narrative about weakness.' Vladislava Gordic Petkovic, Bosnian scholar
