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A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel by Yoko Tawada, winner of the National Book Award.
Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as "the land of sushi." Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): "homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language."
As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they're all next off to Stockholm.
With its intrepid band of companions, Scattered All Over the Earth (the first novel of a trilogy) may bring to mind Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or a surreal Wind in the Willows, but really is just another sui generis Yoko Tawada masterwork.
"Vernacular noir, etymological postapocalypse, a romance in syntax—it's hard to nail down which genre National Book Award winner Tawada's brilliant and beguiling latest belongs to, except to say it's deeply rooted in the power of language...This pulls readers deep into the author's polyphonic convergence of cultures. Once again, Tawada doesn't cease to amaze." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"It could be the end of the world as we know it, but Tawada's vision of the future is intriguing...Tawada expands upon the themes of language, immigration, globalization, and authenticity which underpin this slyly humorous first installment of a planned trilogy." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Threats abound―a changing climate, terrorism, and hostile political structures create danger and uncertainty―but these characters carry within themselves the seeds of a possible new world. Yoko Tawada's Scattered All Over the Earth is a cheerful dystopian novel that celebrates inventiveness, possibilities, and human connections." - Foreword Reviews
This information about Scattered All Over the Earth was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
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credit: Nina Subin
Born in Tokyo in 1960, Yoko Tawada writes in both Japanese and German: she has received the Akutagawa, Kleist, Lessing, Noma, Adelbert von Chamisso, and Tanizaki prizes, as well as the Goethe Medal. Her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award. Rivka Galchen in the New York Times Magazine hailed her work as "magnificently strange."
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