Anatomy of a Night

Amarâq, Eastern Greenland, the end of the world. A lonely, cold, hard place, yet one that’s filled with boundless joy and bewitching natural magic, Amarâq plays host to an annual tragedy: a spate of suicides races through the town each spring, a plague that leaves no family untouched.

Anatomy of a Night details the events of one of these black nights, following the lives of eleven of Amarâq’s inhabitants – their loves and losses, their escapes from Amarâq and their inevitable returns, each victory and every defeat magnified by the unforgiving and unforgettably desolate landscape – and paints a portrait of a mysterious phenomenon that strikes a nearly-forgotten people, the Inuit of Greenland.

Anatomy of a Night is a hauntingly beautiful novel from a writer who has been proclaimed ‘one of the great voices of her generation’.

Anna Kim was born in 1977 in Daejeon, South Korea. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Austrian State Fellowship for Literature, the Elias Canetti Fellowship, the Robert Musil Fellowship, and the 2009 Austrian Prize for Literature. Her novel Frozen Time was published in English translation in 2010.

‘As I write this review and revisit the book I am struck by how well-written it is. It is tempting to compose this article as a set of quotations, to let Anna Kim speak for herself, for no one could doubt the beauty of the writing.’ A Common Reader

‘It is complex, and demands both patience and intelligence from its reader. But if you are willing to take the plunge, to dedicate some time to it, you will be rewarded tenfold. Beautiful and horrific in equal measures.’ A Novel Approach

‘Anna Kim’s great talent is her ability to pull the reader into a dangerous undertow ... one of the great voices of her generation.’ Tiroler Tageszeitung