Description A chance encounter on Portobello Road incites an unsettling, magnetic attraction between Mary, a seventy-five-year-old British spinster, and Cub, a thirteen-year-old Jamaican boy from Brixton.
Mary clings increasingly to phantoms and fantasies as dementia overtakes her reality, latching on to Cub and channeling all of her remaining energy into their relationship.
But her macabre romance with Cub comes to a horrific climax, as white supremacy, poverty, and class conflict explode on the streets of London.
About the Author Ananda Devi was born in 1957 in Mauritius, noted for its confluence of diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic identities.
Devi won her first literary prize at the age of fifteen for a short story in a Radio France Internationale competition.
After a few years spent in Congo-Brazzaville, Devi moved to Ferney-Voltaire in Switzerland in 1989, where she lives today.
She has published twelve novels as well as short stories and poetry, and was featured at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York in 2015.
Her literary awards include the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie (2006) and Prix Télévision Suisse Romande (2007) for Čve de ses décombres, as well as the Prix Louis-Guilloux (2010) and the Prix Mokanda (2012) for other works.
In 2010 Devi was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and in 2014 she was awarded the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises by the Académie Française.
Her latest novel, Manger l'autre (2018) won the Prix Étonnants Voyageurs.
Jeffrey Zuckerman is digital editor of Music & Literature Magazine.
His translations from French include Ananda Devi's Eve Out of Her Ruins (Deep Vellum 2016) and Antoine Volodine's Radiant Terminus (Open Letter 2017) as well as numerous texts by Marie Darrieussecq, Hervé Guibert, Régis Jauffret, and Kaija Saariaho, among others.
A graduate of Yale University, his writing and translations have appeared in Best European Fiction, The Los.
Feminist Press The living days, paperback/ananda devi
