Lost Paradise

Description

A wonderfully charming and mystical fable about angels, Australia and love. Alma and Almut share a fascination for Australia and its ancient peoples; their ceremonies, sand drawings and body paintings. After Alma suffers a traumatic attack, they board a cheap flight from S o Paulo to Sydney, and together begin their journey across their secret continent. Alma slowly recovers through a brief love affair with an Aboriginal artist, and both women become involved with the Angel Project in Perth, where actors dressed as angels are concealed around the city for the public to discover. In a seemingly unconnected story, a man staying at a remote Alpine spa unexpectedly meets a woman he encountered years before and with whom he shared a single night. It was in a faraway city and she was dressed as an angel...

Cees Nooteboom was born in the Hague in 1933. He is a poet and the author of prize-winning fiction and travel books. In 1993 he won the Aristeion European Literature Prize for his novel The Following Story. His books have been translated into many languages.

Beautiful, dreamlike and oddly beguiling * The Times * A charming, sinuous, playful novel...global, universal, in its scope and feeling -- David Robson * Sunday Telegraph * Nooteboom writes beautifully. His prose is clean and precise without feeling sparse, and he manages to combine clarity with intense lyricism -- Rebecca Abrahams * Guardian * A plot as finely tuned as a concert piano...this is a novel which finally soars * Glasgow Herald * Nooteboom has shown himself a master of ironic wisdom, but also of elated, elegiac feeling -- Ben Rogers * Independent on Sunday *