Alba Arikha is the author of four books: Muse and Walking on Ice, published by Macmillan in 1998 and 2000. Her memoir, Major/Minor, about her adolescence in Paris, was published by Quartet Books, shortlisted for the Spear’s awards and selected among the best books of 2012 by the New Yorker. Her last book, a narrative poem, Soon, was set to music and performed as an opera at the Riverside Studios, London. Her new novel, Where To Find Me, will be published by Alma Books in 2018.
In addition to her books, Alba is also a singer-songwriter, has performed in London and Paris and recorded two CD’s.
Agent: Caroline Michel (cmichel@pfd.co.uk)
Senior Assistant: Laurie Robertson (lrobertson@pfd.co.uk)
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Assistant: Lucy Irvine (lirvine@pfd.co.uk)
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Hannah Karalis, a teenager living with her family in 1980s Notting Hill, becomes fascinated by her neighbour, Flora Dobbs, an enigmatic elderly woman who has clearly had an interesting past – but the improbable friendship that the two strike up is abruptly cut short by Flora’s sudden departure from the neighbourhood. Eighteen years later, Hannah is astonished to receive a black notebook, which sets her on a quest to discover the truth and to confront the ghosts of an unresolved past. A gripping and poignant tale of chance encounters, tangled lies and painful discoveries, Where to Find Me is an inspiring account of how to face and overcome the effects of loss and tragedy in our daily lives.
Reviews
“The looping structure and urgent storytelling of Where To Find Me pull the reader into the strange mechanics of our lives, by which historical cataclysms, dumb accident, momentary whims, and inexplicable desires act to bring us together or keep us apart.” – Siri Hustvedt
PUBLISHER: Alma Books Ltd.
PUBLICATION DATE: 20th September 2018
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Art critic Laura Miller is fascinated by the life and work of Dante Omega. Commissioned to write a monograph on him, she is grateful for the chance, for the challenge it presents and as a panacea to her recent divorce. While interviewing him she stumbles upon some disturbing lithographs and a terrible truth emerges.
Reviews
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Composed of 11 vignettes hung on the realisation that a relationship, a marriage or a casual affair has run its course, Walking On Ice is deeply pessimistic cycle of short stories. From a birthday party at which a six-year-old discovers that her mother is having an affair, to a honeymoon couple’s encounter with a fortune teller in Jerusalem, Branca dissects unsettling epiphanies and exposes the fragility of sexual desire and the misplaced expectation of compatibility. Although the descriptions of the glamour, professional fulfillment and material prosperity of her female characters is sometimes clumsy, Branca is brutally honest in her exposure of the myth that love and sex can be managed rationally.
Reviews
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A vivid and haunting coming-of-age memoir set in Paris in the 1980s. The apartment, where Alba and her sister grew up, was a hub of literary and artistic achievement, which still reverberates today. Alba’s tale is played out against the family memories of war and exile and the ever-present echoes of the European holocaust.
Reviews
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An hour outside Paris. a train comes to an unscheduled stop. As the other passengers bicker,confide, flirt, the narrator remembers – lovers, disappointments, childhood, marriage. She talks with Chopin and models for Modigliani. The boundaries of self are dissolved by imagination and memory, until the journey resumes and another life ends.
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