An hour outside Paris, a train comes to an unscheduled stop. As the other passengers bicker, confide, flirt, the narrator remembers – lovers, disappointments, marriage. She talks with Chopin and models for Modigliani. The boundaries of self are dissolved by imagination and memory, until the journey resumes and another life ends.
‘Soon has the freshness of an eye-witness report and yet travels in many directions – in time and space, by train and by memory, by image and by imagination. A beautiful achievement.’
– Adam Zagajewski
‘One hopes, one hunts, for a book that resembles nothing one has read before. Alba Arikha’s Soon is not only a true original, it’s beautiful, moving, and, yes, profound. Which makes it a rare creature indeed.’
– Michael Cunningham
‘Multum in parvo: so musical; such darting observation and tender understanding; such rich seams of memory and imagination. Above all, such awareness of our need to connect, such sheer openness to the joy and pain of being fully alive.’
– Kevin Crossley-Holland
‘Lucid, tender and hypnotic … This is a beautiful book, all the more rich for being spare, a book to pick up again and again, as one might pick up a smooth, polished stone, for its satisfactions and its mysteries.’
– Rupert Thomson