The Woman in the Purple Skirt

Description

'Very powerful ... Reading this book made me feel like I was in an unstable and strange world.' - Sayaka Murata I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I've been wanting to become the friend of the Woman in the Purple Skirt for a very long time... The Woman in the Purple Skirt seems to live in a world of her own. She appears to glide through crowded streets without acknowledging any reaction her presence elicits. Most afternoons, she sits on the same park bench, eating a pastry and ignoring the local children who make a game of trying to get her attention. The Woman in the Purple Skirt is being watched. Someone is following her, always perched just out of sight, monitoring which buses she takes; what she eats; whom she speaks to. But this invisible observer isn't a stalker - it's much more complicated than that. 'A breathless novel ... You too will be obsessed with the Woman in the Purple Skirt and held in suspense until the last page.' - Leila Slimani

Natsuko Imamura was born in Hiroshima, Japan, in 1980. Her fiction has won various prestigious Japanese literary prizes, including the Noma Literary New Face Prize, the Mishima Yukio Prize, and the Akutagawa Prize. She lives in Osaka with her husband and daughter. Lucy North is a British translator of Japanese fiction and non-fiction. Her translations include Toddler Hunting and Other Stories, as yet the sole book of fiction in English by Taeko Kono, and Record of a Night Too Brief, a collection of stories by Hiromi Kawakami. Her fiction translations have appeared in Granta, Words Without Borders, and The Southern Review and in several anthologies, including The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories and The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature. She lives in Hastings, East Sussex.

'Very powerful . . . Meticulous and extremely precise . . . Reading this book made me feel like I was in an unstable and strange world.' - Sayaka Murata 'A breathless novel that depicts with sly humor the strange relationship between two women in contemporary Japan. You too will be obsessed with the Woman in the Purple Skirt and held in suspense until the last page.' - Leila Slimani 'Imamura definitely has a rare talent for depicting people who are a little out of the ordinary. . . . By the time I got to the end, a powerful sense of the narrator's loneliness forcing its way through the madness gripped my heart.' - Yoko Ogawa 'Reading this novel, you can really hear Natsuko Imamura's unique voice, which comes across quite unsparingly and beautifully.' - Hiromi Kawakami 'Imamura offers her reader crisp, refreshing prose. The Woman in the Purple Skirt will keep you firmly in its grips with its persistent, disquieting, matter-of-fact style.' - Oyinkan Braithwaite 'A chilling tale of envy and vulnerability. Clear space on your reading list now.' - Vogue 'A voyeuristic thriller . . . This study in fascination, translated from Japanese, is as unusual as it is alluring.' - Elle 'Delightfully disturbing . . . Imamura does weird singularly well, and keeps the suspense taut throughout the novel, always teasing an answer to the questions: Why this woman? What makes her so special? What makes any of us worth watching at all?' - Refinery 29 'Disquieting and wryly funny, The Woman in the Purple Skirt is a taut and compelling depiction of loneliness and obsession.' - Paula Hawkins