Exquisite Cadavers
“Slyly funny and profoundly thoughtful … not just a fierce rebuttal. It’s a work of brilliance.”
Longlisted, Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize 2020 · The Asian Writer’s Writer of the Year, 2019
Karim and Maya share a home, worry about money, binge-watch films, and love, quarrel, fight and argue all the time. Karim, a young film-maker, carries the starry-eyed dreams of the Arab Revolution. Maya carries her own pressing concerns: an errant father, an unstable job, a chain-smoking habit, a sudden pregnancy. When Karim’s brother disappears in Tunis and Karim wants to go after him, Maya must choose between her partner and her home city, her future and her history.
In a conversation between forms, fictions and truths, Exquisite Cadavers is a novel about a young couple navigating love in London — and, running in its margins, a literary hall of mirrors about an author navigating the inspirations behind her work.
“This spiky, argumentative book is the novel as protest, as polemic, as dark comedy, as game.” — Aida Edemariam, The Guardian
“Does it surprise, grip, make the reader take notice — all those things literature is supposed to do? Easily, yes, yes, and yes again.” — The Irish Times
“A backflipping rebuke to the nexus of culture- and capital-making … It is a joy.” — Stephanie Sy-Quia, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Bold, inventive … An excellent exercise in form and a deeply evocative love story.” — Publishers Weekly
Read John Self’s interview with Meena Kandasamy in The Guardian, and cover designer Carmen R. Balit in Spine.