Strangers at the Port

Curtis - who was included on Granta's recent Best of Young British Novelists list - writes dazzlingly confident prose, too rich to be called spare yet without any superfluous weight. She writes the island as if she were Celine Sciamma shooting Portrait of a Lady on Fire -- Francesca Peacock * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *
An incredible novel about how the quiet, ritualistic lives of a pair sisters are shaken by the arrival of strangers on their island -- Anna Bonet * THE I PAPER *
Strangers at the Port is both a fascinating delve into the small, personal stories sacrificed to the grander sweep of history and a provocative creation of a fable for our times -- Emily Rhodes * THE SPECTATOR *
Lushly poetic -- Lucy Thynne * LITERARY REVIEW *
Curtis's writing is beautiful * GOOD READING *
Reading this wonderfully oblique historical tale is a little like looking at the way light refracts through a prism: its meanings and impressions disperse along its journey to reveal what the author herself has termed 'the slippery overlap between history, fiction and memory' . . . Fascinating -- Catherine Jarvie * MARIE CLAIRE, Best Books of 2023 *
Magnificent -- Cal Revely-Calder * TELEGRAPH REVIEW, Books of the Year *
Stubbornly enigmatic * SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, Books of the Year *
A mesmeric and lyrical novel about a fictive island and its inhabitants, which eschews narrative convention in favour of something more elusive, fractured, and choral . . . truly original -- Ralf Webb * GRANTA, Books of the Year *