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Andres Neuman

Thursday 21st May 2020

Venue
Topping & Company Booksellers of Bath, York Street, Bath, Somerset BA1 1NG
Doors Open
7.45pm
Start Time
8pm
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“Neuman is touched by grace. Readers will find something that can only be found in great literature, the kind written by real poets, a literature that dares to venture into the dark with open eyes and that keeps its eyes open no matter what. The literature of the 21st century will belong to Neuman and a few of his blood brothers.” Roberto Bolaño

Critically acclaimed, prize-winning author Andrés Neuman’s Fracture is an ambitious literary novel set against Japan’s 2011 nuclear accident in a cross-cultural story about how every society remembers and forgets its catastrophes.

An earthquake unnerves Tokyo on March 11, 2011, triggering the Fukushima nuclear disaster—and a tectonic stirring of the collective past. Mr. Yoshi Watanabe, an aging executive at an electronics company and a survivor of the atomic bomb, feels as though he is a fugitive of his own memory. As the seams of his country threaten to come undone yet again, he braces himself to make the biggest decision of his life.

Yoshi Watanabe is one of a few double hibakusha, a survivor of both the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. His status left him as an outsider in a culture unable to deal with what happened. Leaving Japan as a young man, he first moved to Paris, then on to New York, Buenos Aires and Madrid before returning. In each city he had a serious relationship and each of the four women remember their time with Yoshi and reflect on what he taught them about themselves and their place and time. Their stories, told in different languages and describing different loves, prove that nothing ever happens in one place, that every human event reverberates to the ends of the earth.

This is an ambitious and absorbing novel written with intimacy and compassion, a tale about love, trauma, memory and nationhood and about what connects us and what sets us apart.