The House in Smyrna

By: Tatiana Salem Levy

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Synopsis: Winner of The 2015 English Pen Award. From one of Granta’s Best Young Brazilian Novelists comes a startling and powerful story about returning to one’s origins 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 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.

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