The Place of Shells
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The Place of Shells
Narrated by:
Jacqui Bardelang
Buy Now for $24.99
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Narrated by:
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Jacqui Bardelang
About this listen
'A hypnotic dissection of memory, trauma and belonging'
New Statesman
'This attempt to imprint upon humanity the experiences of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in a way that only a novel can achieve deserves to be highly esteemed'
Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police
'Here we find a form of language that attempts to venture, dancing, into a past enveloped in silence'
Yoko Tawada, author of The Last Children of Tokyo
'An eerie, shimmering fever dream . . . strange and beautiful'
Jenny Mustard, author of Okay Days
In the summer of 2020, as Germany slowly emerges from lockdown, a young Japanese woman studying in Göttingen waits at the train station to meet an old friend. Nomiya died a decade earlier in the Tōhoku tsunami, but he has suddenly returned without any explanation.
The reunited friends share a past that's a world away from the tranquillity of Göttingen. Yet Nomiya's spectral presence destabilises something in the city: mysterious guests appear, eerie discoveries are made in the forest and, as the past becomes increasingly vivid, the threads of time threaten to unravel.
With a literary style reminiscent of W. G. Sebald, Yoko Tawada, and Yu Miri, The Place of Shells is an astounding exploration of the strange orbits of memory and the haunting presence of the past.©2025 Mai Ishizawa, Polly Barton (P)2025 Hachette Book Group Audio
Critic Reviews
In Mai Ishizawa's extraordinary, beautiful novel, place and the present are filled with time: she shows us how we can migrate into a past and how our own pasts migrate with us, how we carry scraps of them wherever we go. (Sarah Bernstein, author of Study for Obedience)
A work of great delicacy and seriousness. Ishizawa anchors the temporal and the ghostly with a transfixing pragmatism, and the result is a shifting, tessellated kaleidoscope of memory, architecture, history and grief (Jessica Au, author of Cold Enough for Snow)
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