In this debut short story collection, the author of the acclaimed Rainshadow Orphans merges the inventiveness of David Mitchell and the fairytale allure of Angela Carter to create a powerful magic.
A space-obsessed child conjures up a vortex in his mother’s airing cupboard. A musician finds her friendship with a flock of birds opens up unexpected possibilities. A rat catcher, summoned to a decaying royal palace, is plunged into a battle for the throne of a ruined kingdom. Two newlyweds find themselves inhibited by the arrival in their lives of an outsized and watchful stuffed bear.
Whether snared in traps artfully laid for them, or those of their own making, the characters in Naomi Ishiguro’s delightfully speculative debut collection yearn for freedom and flight, and find their worlds transformed beyond their wildest imaginings.
In this stunning debut collection, characters yearn for freedom and flight, and find their worlds transformed beyond their wildest imaginings.
‘Naomi Ishiguro’s crystal clear prose delights and intrigues’ Sharlene Teo
‘Winsomely written and engagingly quirky, these are inventive tales that favour imagination over gritty realism’ The Sunday Times
‘Ishiguro’s imagination is a place where the fantastical lurks in the margins as a possibility, a flavour rather than a genre’ The Herald
A space-obsessed child conjures up a vortex in his mother’s airing cupboard. A musician finds her friendship with a flock of birds opens up unexpected possibilities. A rat catcher, summoned to a decaying royal palace, is plunged into a battle for the throne of a ruined kingdom. Two newlyweds find themselves inhibited by the arrival in their lives of an outsized and watchful stuffed bear.
Whether snared in traps artfully laid for them, or those of their own making, the characters in Naomi Ishiguro’s delightfully speculative debut collection yearn for freedom and flight, and find their worlds transformed beyond their wildest imaginings.
In this stunning debut collection, characters yearn for freedom and flight, and find their worlds transformed beyond their wildest imaginings.
‘Naomi Ishiguro’s crystal clear prose delights and intrigues’ Sharlene Teo
‘Winsomely written and engagingly quirky, these are inventive tales that favour imagination over gritty realism’ The Sunday Times
‘Ishiguro’s imagination is a place where the fantastical lurks in the margins as a possibility, a flavour rather than a genre’ The Herald
Reviews
An imaginative collection full of wide eyed wonder and millennial wit
Escape Routes sees Ishiguro find inventive and unexpected new ways to explore her themes of freedom, flight and individuality
Ishiguro, daughter of the 2017 Nobel Laureate, is already being touted as a writer of rare talent herself
A wide-ranging speculative short story collection from a striking new voice in fiction
All the emotional power comes from how these tired, stressed, anxious characters could be people that you pass on the street. They could be us
It's whimsical, often melancholy tales are populated by people you feel you've met