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About Above Us The Milky Way
Product Description Above Us the Milky Way is a story about war, immigration, and the remarkable human capacity to create beauty out of horror. As a young family attempts to reconstruct their lives in a new and peaceful country, they are daily drawn back to the first land through remembrance and longing, by news of the continued suffering and loss of loved ones, and by the war dead, who have immigrated and reside with them, haunting their days and illuminating the small joys and wonders offered them by the new land. The novel's structure is built around the alphabet, twenty-six pieces written in the first person that sketch a through-line of memory for the lives of the five daughters, mother, and father. Ghost stories and fairytales are woven with old family photographs and medieval-style watercolor illuminations to create an origin story of loss and remembrance. Review One of Thrillist's Best Books of 2020"Structured as an illuminated alphabet, Karimi’s startling debut pieces together a pastiche of memory, folklore, and multilayered sense impressions with photographs from Karimi’s childhood and illustrations of her own making. The result is a sharply etched treatise on the objects of memory―encouraging a perhaps unavoidable comparison to Proust―which sets itself the monumental task of exploring the atrocity of war both as the bombs strike and as they reverberate down through the generations. Because, as Karimi concludes, a 'war in one place is like a wound in all,' and what else but the letters of an alphabet, or perhaps sisters, could, 'give positive form to the formless' by being 'forever in two places at once: bound to their fixed positions―for who could reorder the sequence of an alphabet?―and leaving their posts to form this... word.' A novel powerful in both its beauty and its uncompromising horror whose themes are as sadly timely as they are eternal." – Starred review, Kirkus “An ambitious abecedary of family, trauma and life and a love letter to the universe with many moments of power and resplendence.” – Jennifer Croft, author of Homesick "Karimi’s inventive, allegorical debut renders a family’s wartime emigration through a polyphonic mix of voices and genres along with evocative color illustrations and photographs... Fans of Lost Children Archive will love this." – Publishers Weekly "With enchantment and a pounding heart, I devoured this wondrous book, beautiful and fearless, rich in grace and compassion, deeply imagined and unlike any other. It is no less than marvelous." – Rikki Ducornet "Above Us In the Milky Way is a philosophical, richly sensory meditation on memory, loss, nostalgia, and the inheritances of war. Illustrated with family photographs and exquisite, often surreal, watercolors, Fowzia Karimi offers us intimate portals to grief, displacement, and survival." – Cristina García, author of Here in Berlin and other novels "Fowzia Karimi's debut novel is an extraordinary book--one which is both witness to its time, an homage to Afghanistan, to family, and to what endures: stories and love and beauty. Inside it you will find humanity's imaginary so beautifully disclosed." – Micheline Aharonian Marcom, author of six novels including The Brick House and Creative Director of The New American Story Project "A narrative that tells the stories of five young sisters, their mother and father, of the land that they had to leave, of the land they came to, of what was left behind, of what was found, of what was lost, of what was attained, of the passage of time in their lives and in the lives of others, passage not rendered chronologically, as time itself is not always experienced thus: these are the bare bones that comprise Fowzia Karimi's remarkable Above Us the Milky Way. Words here can't suffice to say what she does beyond this. No one here is named and yet, in that ineffable way we know things though acknowledge mystery and what we can't know, this book says so much in such a deep, basic, telling way - of
