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Above Us the Milky Way
- An Illuminated Alphabet
- Narrated by: Fowzia Karimi
- Length: 11 hrs and 33 mins
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Above Us the Milky Way
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Publisher's Summary
Above Us the Milky Way is a story about war, immigration, and the remarkable human capacity to create beauty out of horror. As a young family attempts to reconstruct their lives in a new and peaceful country, they are daily drawn back to the first land through remembrance and longing, by news of the continued suffering and loss of loved ones, and by the war dead, who have immigrated and reside with them, haunting their days and illuminating the small joys and wonders offered them by the new land.
The novel's structure is built around the alphabet, 26 pieces written in the first person that sketch a through-line of memory for the lives of the five daughters, mother, and father. Ghost stories and fairytales are woven with old family photographs and medieval-style watercolor illuminations to create an origin story of loss and remembrance.
Narrated by the author.
Critic Reviews
Winner of the 2020 Foreword INDIES Editor's Choice Prize Fiction
Winner of the Big Other Book Award for Fiction
Winner of the 2021 Balcones Fiction Prize
A 2020 Fiction Discovery Prize Winner - WLT Book Awards
Winner of the 2020 PubWest Book Design Award (Bronze)
One of Thrillist's Best Books of 2020
Longlisted for Reading the West Book Award
“[Above Us the Milky Way] has what certain great novels have - and I’m calling this a great novel intentionally - which is explicit working-out of narrative structure. This book has a really astute and generous conversation with its readers. An enchanting, inventive, and powerful novel." (Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm)
"Structured as an illuminated alphabet, Karimi’s startling debut pieces together a pastiche of memory, folklore, and multilayered sense impressions with photographs from Karimi’s childhood and illustrations of her own making. The result is a sharply etched treatise on the objects of memory - encouraging a perhaps unavoidable comparison to Proust - which sets itself the monumental task of exploring the atrocity of war both as the bombs strike and as they reverberate down through the generations. Because, as Karimi concludes, a 'war in one place is like a wound in all,' and what else but the letters of an alphabet, or perhaps sisters, could, 'give positive form to the formless' by being 'forever in two places at once: bound to their fixed positions - for who could reorder the sequence of an alphabet? - and leaving their posts to form this...word.' A novel powerful in both its beauty and its uncompromising horror whose themes are as sadly timely as they are eternal." (Kirkus, starred review)
"Karimi’s inventive, allegorical debut renders a family’s wartime emigration through a polyphonic mix of voices and genres.... Fans of Lost Children Archive will love this." (Publishers Weekly)