The House in Smyrna

Tatiana Salem Levy (trans. Alison Entrekin)

‘Levy’s writing is a joy … Her prose is rich, filled with a sense of the vividness and generosity of an author’s available inspirations: the clamour of the senses, the restless truths of the body, the turns and consolations and perils of thought, the wonders of both beauty and ugliness and the meaning and architecture of words themselves.’

A.L. Kennedy, Granta (UK)

‘Teasing … Levy has crafted a puzzling, disturbing story that at times leaves the reader feeling blindfolded in a maze.’

Suzi Feay, Financial Times

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‘This is a novel about reconciliation and finding one's own place in the world, but the precise shades of its meaning are elusive, glimpsed hazily through deceptively simple prose which manages to be both unflinching and enigmatic all at once.’

The Herald

‘[A] beautiful book, acute and deeply felt, every word earned and revealing.’ Pick of the Week

Cameron Woodhead, The Age

‘The reader is inevitably drawn into Tatiana’s gravitational field, much like Lewis Carroll’s Alice. A stunning and creative narrator.’

Bravo! (Brazil)

'With Tatiana Salem Levy, everything comes directly from the heart: pain, love, desire, death. A breathtaking novel.'

La Liberté (France)

‘A wonderful autobiographical saga.’

Notícias (Spain)

‘With intimate prose, combining delicacy and vigor, she is an outstanding voice in new Brazilian literature. If you haven’t read her yet, you’re missing out!’

O Globo (Brazil)

‘Light-footed and subtle.’

Stefan Tobler, The Independent

‘Wonderful … deceptively simple prose carrying a great power of sorrow and, interestingly, hope.’

Ian McEwan

From one of Granta’s Best Young Brazilian Novelists comes a startling and powerful story about returning to one’s origins in order to move forward.

In Rio de Janeiro, a woman suffering from a mysterious illness, which is eroding her body and mind, decides to accept a challenge from her grandfather: to take the key to the house where he grew up — in the Turkish city of Smyrna — and open the door.

As she embarks on this pilgrimage, she begins to write of her progress. The writing soon becomes an exploration of her family’s legacy of displacement in Europe, told in several narrative strands. Sifting through family stories — her grandfather’s migration from Turkey to Brazil, her parents’ exile in Portugal under the Brazilian military dictatorship, her mother’s death, and her own love affair with a violent man — she traces her family’s history in a journey to make sense of the past and to understand her place in it.

With an epic sweep of time and place — traversing Brazil, Turkey, and Portugal — this is a profoundly moving portrait of a young woman finding her way back into life. Spare, heartfelt, and evocative, The House in Smyrna is an unforgettable story from one of the most accomplished and original new voices in Brazil.

A.L. Kennedy, Granta (UK)

‘Teasing … Levy has crafted a puzzling, disturbing story that at times leaves the reader feeling blindfolded in a maze.’

Suzi Feay, Financial Times

View all reviews

The Herald

‘[A] beautiful book, acute and deeply felt, every word earned and revealing.’ Pick of the Week

Cameron Woodhead, The Age

‘The reader is inevitably drawn into Tatiana’s gravitational field, much like Lewis Carroll’s Alice. A stunning and creative narrator.’

Bravo! (Brazil)

'With Tatiana Salem Levy, everything comes directly from the heart: pain, love, desire, death. A breathtaking novel.'

La Liberté (France)

‘A wonderful autobiographical saga.’

Notícias (Spain)

‘With intimate prose, combining delicacy and vigor, she is an outstanding voice in new Brazilian literature. If you haven’t read her yet, you’re missing out!’

O Globo (Brazil)

‘Light-footed and subtle.’

Stefan Tobler, The Independent

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Details

Format:Paperback

Size: 198mm × 140mm

Extent:160pp

ISBN (13):9781925106411

RRP:$27.99

Pub date:2 Feb 2015

Rights Held: UK & Commonwealth

Rights Sold: India (Falcon Books)

High-res cover:Download Image

AWARDS

2015 English PEN Award - Winner

CATEGORIES / tags

AUTHOR

Tatiana Salem Levy

Tatiana Salem Levy is a writer, essayist, and researcher at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Her first novel, The House in Smyrna (also published by Scribe and translated by Alison Entrekin), won Brazil’s biggest literary award — the São Paulo Prize for Literature — for a debut work. She lives in Lisbon, and is a columnist for the newspaper Valor Econômico.

TRANSLATOR

Alison Entrekin

Australian translator Alison Entrekin has translated over forty books from the Portuguese, including the classics City of God by Paulo Lins, Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector, and My Sweet Orange Tree by José Mauro de Vasconcelos. In 2019, she was awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Translation Prize and PEN medallion for the body of her work. Other honours include shortlistings for the 2004 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the 2012 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the 2013 PEN America Translation Prize. She teaches literary translation privately, and occasionally writes about translation (in Portuguese) at: https://www.revistapessoa.com.