Tetra Nova
Format:Paperback
Publisher:The 87 Press
Publishing:13th Nov '25
£16.99
This title is due to be published on 13th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
The debut novel from award winning performance artist and poet Sophia Terazawa.
An operatic, polyphonic novel that follows Emi and Lua, as they grapple with Vietnamese intergenerational stories across genocide, psychosis, and the resistance that follows.
Tetra Nova is an operatic, polyphonic novel. At its heart lies the question of postcolonial burdens of identity, exile, narration, and history.
In late-twentieth century Saigon, Lua Mater – a performance artist – meets Emi Terazawa, a child visiting her mother’s country for the first time since the end of the war. The sudden arrival of a tiny Panda prompts fate to intervene, taking Lua and Emi on a dreamlike and investigative journey into history, language, legacy and resistance.
Darting between the temples of Nagasaki, the mountains of Tucson, and an island refugee camp off the coast of Malaysia, Lua and Emi become one narrator, blending their voices into a performance of intergenerational stories that reach their crescendo with a song for humanity beyond trauma.
In the opening to Sophia Terazawa’s Tetra Nova, an elephant knocks the narrator unconscious. He awakens to a soft skull. Ears on top of his head. The disappearance of his fingers and ankles. All anatomy rearranged. The narrator is a stuffed plush Panda. He falls back asleep, then awakens again: now she’s a human girl. No one warns you about this shape-shifting. Like the body of its stuffed plush narrator Panda, Terazawa’s writing removes the points of articulation in Western storytelling, elevating a joyfully disjointed sensibility in its place. Tetra Nova celebrates the multitude, proving there’s more room for every voice once you break the mould.
-- Erin Vachon * The RumpISBN: 9781068751585
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