Spontaneous Acts

The highly anticipated new novel from award-winning, critically acclaimed novelist Yoko Tawada.<BR><BR>Patrik is a literary researcher living in Berlin, a city just coming back to life after lockdown. Though his beloved opera houses are open again, Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed.<BR><BR>He is supposed to give a paper at a conference in Paris, on the poetry collection Threadsuns by Paul Celan, but he can't get past the first question on the registration form: 'What is your nationality?'<BR><BR>As Patrik attempts to find a connection in a world that constantly overwhelms him, he meets a mysterious stranger. The man's name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik . . .<BR><BR>Yoko Tawada's mesmerizing new novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which the solace of friendship, reading, conversation, music - of seeing and being seen - is examined and celebrated.<BR><BR>Spontaneous Acts reaches out to all of us who find meaning and even obsession in the words of those before us.<BR><BR>Previous praise for Tawada:<BR><BR>'Every Yoko Tawada novel pulls the ground out from under us, but gives us new senses in return.' Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing<BR><BR>'Something about the way Tawada writes . . . allows the reader to take the most surreal and fantastical elements of the work completely seriously.' Lucy Scholes<BR><BR>'Tawada writes beautifully about unbearable things.' Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither