First published 1993
Etheria cannot speak. Her eccentric father has rendered her mute, then trades her away for a piece of jade. Her sister Memory takes up the tale, recounting their unusual childhood filled with Lewis Carroll stories and an orangutan called Dr. Johnson. The sinister Radulph Tubbs, Queen Victoria's Dragon of Industry, pursues Etheria with toxic devotion. The story moves from Oxford to Egypt, where millions of mummified ibis birds await conversion into fertilizer. Baconfield the architect brings down a pyramid through his ambitions. A rejected hunger artist, swollen with rage and speaking in strange tongues, plans violent retribution. Memory weaves together these threads of family trauma, colonial exploitation, and personal vengeance. The novel explores how language shapes power, how memory preserves and distorts experience, and how desire can corrupt or redeem.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, fantasy, magical-realism, 19th-century
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: family-secrets, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Oxford, Egypt
Period: 19th-century
160 pages · Hardcover · Dalkey Archive Pr
Content warnings: colonialism, violence