First I was grabbed by this cover that feels both like classic art, and makes me want to figure out what is happening. Are people being carried up to the heavens in the smoke of the fire?
This is a world that seems to have secrets around every corner. The people who inhabit this place have an "affliction" and are set entirely apart from the world. Makes me think of leper colonies. A few lines that really drew me in:
"Our streets and park and river carried names in a language we did not
speak."
"Aside from ‘mothers,’ the only game we played with any regularity
was ‘stranger.’ We had never seen a stranger ourselves, so naturally
we found them fertile ground for make-believe."
And this insight into humanity makes me very curious to see what else the author has to say on the subject: "This was how life elsewhere
worked upon people. They accumulated years rather purposelessly, so
that as they aged they did not unearth their deepest, truest selves but,
on the contrary, grew increasingly dispossessed of themselves."
This is a world that seems to have secrets around every corner. The people who inhabit this place have an "affliction" and are set entirely apart from the world. Makes me think of leper colonies. A few lines that really drew me in:
"Our streets and park and river carried names in a language we did not
speak."
"Aside from ‘mothers,’ the only game we played with any regularity
was ‘stranger.’ We had never seen a stranger ourselves, so naturally
we found them fertile ground for make-believe."
And this insight into humanity makes me very curious to see what else the author has to say on the subject: "This was how life elsewhere
worked upon people. They accumulated years rather purposelessly, so
that as they aged they did not unearth their deepest, truest selves but,
on the contrary, grew increasingly dispossessed of themselves."