The Story of H by Marina Perezagua (Pre-Owned)

Product Description

From an audacious new talent, The Story of H describes a searing quest by a Japanese woman and an American soldier to find a girl who goes missing in the aftermath of Hiroshima, a journey that spans the globe and travels to the darkest corners of the human mind and memory

 August 6, 1945: the day Enola Gay unleashed an atomic inferno over Hiroshima. In the wake of its devastation, two stories unfold. There’s Jim, an American soldier who was entrusted with taking care of Yoro, a Japanese girl who then disappears after the atomic bomb falls. And there’s H, a Japanese child who is at school when the bomb drops and is indelibly marked by its destruction. Both victims of the bomb, H and Jim meet for the first time in New York years later—their paths cross by chance, they fall in love, and together they continue Jim’s search for Yoro. A quixotic twenty-first century quest to discover what makes us human, from refugee camps to the slave mines of Africa, from Brazil to Borneo, Japan to Mexico, it’s also a journey that plumbs the depths and heights of cruelty and compassion, vulnerability and violence. 

Marina Perezagua’s urgent, incantatory, and highly original novel moves us beyond our understanding of history as broad and sweeping to the individual stories of those who feel joy and pain, who suffer and transcend. Both dazzling and dark, The Story of H pulsates with a terrible beauty and power that lingers with the reader long after the last page.

Editorial Reviews

“Marina Perezagua is an exciting new voice, one of the best of the new generation of Spanish writers.” — Salman Rushdie

“Inventive...this ambitious book plunges with courage into the moral morass of a horrific period in history.” — Publishers Weekly

“A kaleidoscope of imagination and empathy. The Story of H bursts into life--fast, hot, and explosive like great histories in the making.” — Lila Azam Zanganeh, author of The Enchanter

“The Story of H is a novel of survivors, written with merciless beauty—a dance of death, sex, and love. Marina Perezagua is one of those rare writers who can conjure horror and compassion with a lyricism as defiant as it is terrifying.” — Mariana Enriquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire

“Rich with symbolism and recurring motifs, the story folds in on itself like origami. . . This thought-provoking novel charting the aching distance between the heart and tongue gives voice to the mutability and resilience of the human spirit.” — Booklist

“...An epic novel . . . Calls to mind Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House.” — Vanity Fair

About the Author

Marina Perezagua is a Spanish novelist and short story writer known for her powerfully visual and mind-bending narratives. She has published two short story collections and a novel in Spain and her stories have been published in outlets including Electric Literature and Granta UK. She has a degree in art history and is currently completing her PhD at New York University, where she also teaches at the NYU Master’s Program in Creative Writing in Spanish. She practices freediving and has swum across the Gibraltar Strait in less than four hours.