From an audacious new talent, The Story of H describes a searing quest by a Japanese woman and an American soldier to find a girl who goes missing in the aftermath of Hiroshima, a journey that spans the globe and travels to the darkest corners of the human mind and memory August 6, 1945: the day Enola Gay unleashed an atomic inferno over Hiroshima. In the wake of its devastation, two stories unfold. There’s Jim, an American soldier who was entrusted with taking care of Yoro, a Japanese girl who then disappears after the atomic bomb falls. And there’s H, a Japanese child who is at school when the bomb drops and is indelibly marked by its destruction. Both victims of the bomb, H and Jim meet for the first time in New York years later—their paths cross by chance, they fall in love, and together they continue Jim’s search for Yoro. A quixotic twenty-first century quest to discover what makes us human, from refugee camps to the slave mines of Africa, from Brazil to Borneo, Japan to Mexico, it’s also a journey that plumbs the depths and heights of cruelty and compassion, vulnerability and violence. Marina Perezagua’s urgent, incantatory, and highly original novel moves us beyond our understanding of history as broad and sweeping to the individual stories of those who feel joy and pain, who suffer and transcend. Both dazzling and dark, The Story of H pulsates with a terrible beauty and power that lingers with the reader long after the last page.
Author
Marina Perezagua (Sevilla, 1978) es escritora y profesora. Licenciada en Historia del Arte por la Universidad de Sevilla, vive fuera de España desde hace muchos años, los últimos quince en Nueva York. Ha dado clases de español y cultura española en Lyon y en diversas universidades privadas y públicas de Nueva York. Ha publicado dos libros de relatos, Criaturas abisales y Leche, éste último traducido al japonés y las novelas Yoro y Don Quijote de Manhattan. Marina Perezagua is a writer and an open water swimmer. She was born in Seville, Spain. She graduated in Art History from the University of Seville. She obtained her PhD in philology in the United States and later on she became a professor of language, literature, history and Latin American cinema at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Afterwards, she worked for two years at the Instituto Cervantes de Lyon. Today she lives in New York and works as a professor at New York University.
