The Wandering
Published on 13. February 2020
Book
Hardback
448 pages
978-1-78730-117-7 (ISBN)
Description
*The most unusual novel you will read all year, where you create your own story*
'An ingenious choose-your-own-adventure challenge... Questions such as: "Where am I going?"... "Which choice will make my life worthwhile?" feel existential and urgent... Who can travel, and on what conditions, is one of the primary human rights questions of our era, and The Wandering skilfully takes it on.' Guardian
You've grown roots, you're gathering moss. You're desperate to escape your boring life teaching English in Jakarta, to go out and see the world. So you make a Faustian pact with a devil, who gives you a gift, and a warning. A pair of red shoes to take you wherever you want to go.
You're forever wandering, everywhere and nowhere, but where is your home?
And where will you choose to go?
To New York, to follow your dreams?
To Berlin or Amsterdam? Lima or Tijuana? Or onto a train that will never stop?
The choices you make about which pages to turn to may mean you'll become a tourist or an undocumented migrant, a mother or a murderer, and you will meet many travellers with their own stories to tell. As your paths cross and intertwine, you'll soon realise that no story is ever new.
The Wandering is a novel about the highs and lows of global nomadism, the politics and privileges of travel and desire, and the freedoms and limitations of the choices we make, by one of Asia's most exciting writers. It's a reminder that borders are real, and a playful experiment that turns the traditional adventure story on its head.
Winner of an English PEN Translates Award, and a Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America
'An ingenious choose-your-own-adventure challenge... Questions such as: "Where am I going?"... "Which choice will make my life worthwhile?" feel existential and urgent... Who can travel, and on what conditions, is one of the primary human rights questions of our era, and The Wandering skilfully takes it on.' Guardian
You've grown roots, you're gathering moss. You're desperate to escape your boring life teaching English in Jakarta, to go out and see the world. So you make a Faustian pact with a devil, who gives you a gift, and a warning. A pair of red shoes to take you wherever you want to go.
You're forever wandering, everywhere and nowhere, but where is your home?
And where will you choose to go?
To New York, to follow your dreams?
To Berlin or Amsterdam? Lima or Tijuana? Or onto a train that will never stop?
The choices you make about which pages to turn to may mean you'll become a tourist or an undocumented migrant, a mother or a murderer, and you will meet many travellers with their own stories to tell. As your paths cross and intertwine, you'll soon realise that no story is ever new.
The Wandering is a novel about the highs and lows of global nomadism, the politics and privileges of travel and desire, and the freedoms and limitations of the choices we make, by one of Asia's most exciting writers. It's a reminder that borders are real, and a playful experiment that turns the traditional adventure story on its head.
Winner of an English PEN Translates Award, and a Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America
Reviews / Votes
An ingenious choose-your-own-adventure challenge... Questions such as: "Where am I going?"... "Which choice will make my life worthwhile?" feel existential and urgent... Who can travel, and on what conditions, is one of the primary human rights questions of our era, and The Wandering skilfully takes it on. -- Lauren Elkin * Guardian * With its choose-your-own adventure structure, The Wandering is fiction at its most lifelike, presenting the reader with choices and inevitable misgivings... It is also fiction at its most untethered, where readers can hurl themselves across time zones, selves and situations, free of risk, danger or discrimination. -- Matthew Janney * Guardian * An ingeniously crafted debut which lets you make your own choices about where you want the story to go. This is an electrifying novel about cosmopolitanism and global nomadism that keeps readers on their toes. -- Rabeea Saleem * Book Riot * Sets you free to roam the Earth... an incisive commentary on the cosmopolitan condition. -- Tiffany Tsao The perfect match of theme and genre...impeccably executed... This book is escapism taken to the next level, while still making serious and significant comments about modern societies... Paramaditha excels at mordant observations about migration, the brutality of Trump's America, the falsehood of the American dream, and the personal dimension of the 'refugee crisis'... [It] made me think about the world, about chance and fate and the choices we make. -- Helen Vassallo * Translating Women * A cleverly crafted tale about the illusion of free will, and the stakes and pressures that accompany the choices influenced by one's identity in the world. -- Cher Tan * The Saturday Paper * A story of migration, of searching the world for happiness and hoping that it will be found over the next page (or if you turn to page 42)... While it might seem at first to be a book about travel, it is in fact a tale of belonging... A deeply affecting, intensely personal novel that uses its experimental method of storytelling to worm its way into your very bones... an interactive adventure like no other. -- Will Heath * Books and Bao * Intan Paramaditha shakes up her readers. Her stories reveal that the most terrifying thing in life is not one of the supernatural ghosts that populate her work, but human prejudice. As far as I'm concerned, only writers of genius are able to convey a layered and nuanced world, and Paramaditha is one of them. -- Eka Kurniawan This is a book for the new age - put yourself in the shoes of a global nomad and choose which way you want to go. * BNE Magazine Australia *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 222 mm
Width: 144 mm
Thickness: 39 mm
Weight
592 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78730-117-7 (9781787301177)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Intan Paramaditha (Author)
Intan Paramaditha is an Indonesian writer now based in Sydney. She is the acclaimed author of two short story collections, Sihir Perempuan (2005) and Kumpulan Budak Setan (2010, with Eka Kurniawan and Ugoran Prasad), from which the stories in her first collection in English, Apple and Knife, are drawn. Her fiction has received awards in Indonesia, including the Kompas Best Short Story Award, Tempo Best Literary Fiction of the Year, and Khatulistiwa Literary Awards shortlist. She holds a PhD from New York University and teaches Media and Film Studies at Macquarie University. The Wandering is her debut novel. intanparamaditha.com
Intan Paramaditha is an Indonesian writer now based in Sydney. She is the acclaimed author of two short story collections, Sihir Perempuan (2005) and Kumpulan Budak Setan (2010, with Eka Kurniawan and Ugoran Prasad), from which the stories in her first collection in English, Apple and Knife, are drawn. Her fiction has received awards in Indonesia, including the Kompas Best Short Story Award, Tempo Best Literary Fiction of the Year, and Khatulistiwa Literary Awards shortlist. She holds a PhD from New York University and teaches Media and Film Studies at Macquarie University. The Wandering is her debut novel. intanparamaditha.com