Asunder

Marie's job as a guard at the National Gallery in London offers her the life she always wanted, one of invisibility and quiet contemplation. But amid the hushed corridors of the Gallery surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belies their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the museum guard who slipped and fell moments before reaching the suffragette Mary Richardson as she took a blade to one of the gallery's masterpieces on the eve of the First World War.After nine years there, Marie begins to feel the tug of restlessness. A decisive change comes in the form of a winter trip to Paris, where, with the arrival of an uninvited guest and an unexpected encounter, her carefully contained world is torn open.Asunder is a rich, resonant novel of beguiling depths and beautiful strangeness, exploring the delicate balance between creation and destruction, control and surrender.

Literature & Fiction

Aridjis, Chloe

Contemporary

Vintage

Marie's job as a guard at the National Gallery in London offers her the life she always wanted, one of invisibility and quiet contemplation. But amid the hushed corridors of the Gallery surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belies their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the museum guard who slipped and fell moments before reaching the suffragette Mary Richardson as she took a blade to one of the gallery's masterpieces on the eve of the First World War.
After nine years there, Marie begins to feel the tug of restlessness. A decisive change comes in the form of a winter trip to Paris, where, with the arrival of an uninvited guest and an unexpected encounter, her carefully contained world is torn open.
Asunder is a rich, resonant novel of beguiling depths and beautiful strangeness, exploring the delicate balance between creation and destruction, control and surrender.

United States

Mariner Books

Marie's job as a guard at the National Gallery in London offers her the life she always wanted, one of invisibility and quiet contemplation. But amid the hushed corridors of the Gallery surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belies their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the museum guard who slipped and fell moments before reaching the suffragette Mary Richardson as she took a blade to one of the gallery's masterpieces on the eve of the First World War.After nine years there, Marie begins to feel the tug of restlessness. A decisive change comes in the form of a winter trip to Paris, where, with the arrival of an uninvited guest and an unexpected encounter, her carefully contained world is torn open."Asunder" is a rich, resonant novel of beguiling depths and beautiful strangeness, exploring the delicate balance between creation and destruction, control and surrender.

Harper

Tatiana, a young Mexican woman, is adrift in Berlin. Choosing a life of solitude, she takes a job transcribing notes for the reclusive Doktor Weiss. Through him she meets 'an illustrator turned meteorologist' Jonas, a Berliner who has used clouds and the sky's constant shape-shifting as his escape from reality. As their three paths intersect and merge, the contours of all their worlds begins to change...

Book of Clouds (First Edition)

Black Cat.

Vintage Digital

Book of Clouds is a haunting, masterfully wrought debut novel about a young woman adrift in Berlin, where a string of fateful encounters leads to romance, violence, and revelation. Having escaped her overbearing family a continent away, Tatiana settles in Berlin and cultivates solitude while distancing herself from the city’s past. Yet the phantoms of Berlinseeping in through the floorboards of her apartment, lingering in the abandoned subterraneaare more alive to her than the people she passes on her daily walks. When she takes a job transcribing notes for the reclusive historian Doktor Weiss, her life in Berlin becomes more complexand more perilous. Through Weiss, she meets Jonas, a meteorologist who, as a child in the GDR, took solace in the sky’s constant shape-shifting, an antidote to his grim and unyielding reality. As their three paths intersect and merge, the contours of all their worlds change, culminating in an act of violence that will leave none of them untouched. Unfolding with the strange, charged logic of a dream, Book of Clouds is a profound portrait of a city forever in flux, and of the myths we cling to in order to give shape to our lives.

Book of Clouds

Grove Press/ Black Cat

Ulverscroft

Renowned internationally for her lyrically unsettling novels, PEN/Faulkner Award winner Chloe Aridjis now offers readers her first collection of shorter works, with an introduction by Tom McCarthy\nChloe Aridjis’s stories and essays are known to transport readers into liminal, often dreamlike, realms. In this collection of works, we meet a woman guided only by a plastic bag drifting through the streets of Berlin who discovers a nonsense-named bar that is home to papier-mâché monsters and one glass-encased somnambulist. Floating through space, cosmonauts are confronted not only with wonder and astonishment, but tedium and solitude. And in Mexico City, stray dogs animate public spaces, “infusing them with a noble life force.” In her pen portraits, Aridjis turns her eye to expats and outsiders, including artists and writers such as Leonora Carrington, Mavis Gallant, and Beatrice Hastings.\nExploring the complexity of exile and urban alienation, Dialogue with a Somnambulist showcases “the rare writer who reinvents herself in each book” (Garth Greenwell) and who is as imaginatively at home in the short form as in her longer fiction.

Dialogue with a Somnambulist: Stories, Essays & A Portrait Gallery

Essays & Correspondence

Catapult

Sea Monsters

'Sea Monsters is a mesmerizing, revelatory novel, smart and funny and laced with a strangeness that is never facile but serves as a profound and poetic tool for navigating our shared world. Chloe Aridjis is the rare writer who reinvents herself in each book; she is, for my money, one of the most brilliant novelists working in English today' Garth Greenwell\nOne autumn afternoon in Mexico City, 17-year-old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking – recklessness, impulse, independence – and may also help her fulfil an unusual obsession: to track down a troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs who have recently escaped a Soviet circus touring Mexico. They head for Zipolite, the ‘Beach of the Dead’, a community peopled by hippies, nudists, beach combers and eccentric storytellers, and Luisa searches for someone, anyone, who will ‘promise, no matter what, to remain a mystery’. But as she wanders the shoreline, she begins to discover that a quest is more easily envisioned than accomplished.\nAnd so unfolds a phantasmagorical tale of adolescence, transgression and disenchantment in late 1980s Mexico, a place of long nights, insistent sun and relentless rain. Sea Monsters is an intoxicating evocation of past selves and buried histories, the pull of fantasy colliding with the stark light of reality – a dreamlike yet vivid novel about the moments and mysteries that shape us.

Literary

'Sea Monsters is a mesmerizing, revelatory novel, smart and funny and laced with a strangeness that is never facile but serves as a profound and poetic tool for navigating our shared world. Chloe Aridjis is the rare writer who reinvents herself in each book; she is, for my money, one of the most brilliant novelists working in English today' Garth GreenwellOne autumn afternoon in Mexico City, 17-year-old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Toms, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking recklessness, impulse, independence and may also help her fulfil an unusual obsession: to track down a troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs who have recently escaped a Soviet circus touring Mexico. They head for Zipolite, the Beach of the Dead, a community peopled by hippies, nudists, beach combers and eccentric storytellers, and Luisa searches for someone, anyone, who will promise, no matter what, to remain a mystery. But as she wanders the shoreline, she begins to discover that a quest is more easily envisioned than accomplished.And so unfolds a phantasmagorical tale of adolescence, transgression and disenchantment in late 1980s Mexico, a place of long nights, insistent sun and relentless rain. Sea Monsters is an intoxicating evocation of past selves and buried histories, the pull of fantasy colliding with the stark light of reality a dreamlike yet vivid novel about the moments and mysteries that shape us.

Chatto&Windus

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Aridjis, Chloe. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Aridjis, Chloe

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Aridjis, Chloe. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Asunder

Asunder

Asunder

Book of Clouds (First Edition)

Asunder

Book of Clouds

Asunder

Dialogue with a Somnambulist: Stories, Essays & A Portrait Gallery

Sea Monsters

Sea Monsters