Synopses & Reviews
Tatiana "Pluta" Spektor was a mostly happy, if awkward, young girl — until her sociologist father was disappeared during Argentina's Dirty War. Sent a world away by her grieving mother to attend boarding school outside New York City, Pluta wrestles alone with the unresolved tragedy and at last runs away: to the streets of Brooklyn in 1980, where she figuratively — and literally — spreads her wings. Told with haunting fabulist imagery by debut novelist Anca L. Szilagyi, this searing tale of love, loss, estrangement, and coming of age is an unflinching exploration of the personal devastation wrought by political repression.
Review
"Daughters of the Air tells the story of Tatiana (aka Pluta), a girl attempting to break away from her past while haunted by the memory of her father, who was 'disappeared' by the Argentine government. The book offers a moving and memorable exploration of how the traumas of history burrow into individuals and fester, sprouting strange and sometimes even lovely phenomena." Peter Mountford, author of A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism
Review
"Her work feels like a fairy tale--the sort of thing you'd find handwritten on a tiny scroll . . . under a mushroom in the middle of a forest on the longest day of the year." Seattle Review of Books
Review
"A riveting and magical lament: for childhood, for the lost, and for the disappeared. Szilagyi has written a heartbreaking pageturner, rich in history and humanity." Sean Michaels, author of Us Conductors, winner of the Giller Prize
About the Author
Anca L. Szilágyi grew up in Brooklyn. Her debut novel, Daughters of the Air, releases December 2017. Her essays and short stories appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, Gastronomica, Fairy Tale Review, among other publications. She is the recipient of the inaugural Artist Trust/Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award, a Made at Hugo House fellowship, and awards from the Vermont Studio Center, 4Culture, the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and the Jack Straw Cultural Center. The Stranger hailed Anca as one of the "fresh new faces in Seattle fiction." She lives in Seattle with her husband. Learn more about her at ancawrites.com.
Anca Szilágyi, Susan DeFreitas on PowellsBooks.Blog
If Anca Szilágyi’s
Daughters of the Air is a fairy tale, it is a real one of the old school, forged in fire and annealed in blood. If it is a work of realism, it reveals how reality fractures in the face of falsehood — family secrets no less than state ones...
Read More»