The Wandering

An ingenious choose-your-own-adventure challenge… Questions such as: “Where am I going?”… “Which choice will make my life worthwhile?” feel existential and urgent… Who can travel, and on what conditions, is one of the primary human rights questions of our era, and The Wandering skilfully takes it on. – Lauren Elkin * Guardian *With its choose-your-own adventure structure, The Wandering is fiction at its most lifelike, presenting the reader with choices and inevitable misgivings… It is also fiction at its most untethered, where readers can hurl themselves across time zones, selves and situations, free of risk, danger or discrimination. – Matthew Janney * Guardian *An ingeniously crafted debut which lets you make your own choices about where you want the story to go. This is an electrifying novel about cosmopolitanism and global nomadism that keeps readers on their toes. – Rabeea Saleem * Book Riot *Sets you free to roam the Earth… an incisive commentary on the cosmopolitan condition. – Tiffany TsaoThe perfect match of theme and genre…impeccably executed… This book is escapism taken to the next level, while still making serious and significant comments about modern societies… Paramaditha excels at mordant observations about migration, the brutality of Trump’s America, the falsehood of the American dream, and the personal dimension of the ‘refugee crisis’… [It] made me think about the world, about chance and fate and the choices we make. – Helen Vassallo * Translating Women *A cleverly crafted tale about the illusion of free will, and the stakes and pressures that accompany the choices influenced by one’s identity in the world. – Cher Tan * The Saturday Paper *A story of migration, of searching the world for happiness and hoping that it will be found over the next page (or if you turn to page 42)… While it might seem at first to be a book about travel, it is in fact a tale of belonging… A deeply affecting, intensely personal novel that uses its experimental method of storytelling to worm its way into your very bones… an interactive adventure like no other. – Will Heath * Books and Bao *Intan Paramaditha shakes up her readers. Her stories reveal that the most terrifying thing in life is not one of the supernatural ghosts that populate her work, but human prejudice. As far as I’m concerned, only writers of genius are able to convey a layered and nuanced world, and Paramaditha is one of them. – Eka KurniawanThis is a book for the new age - put yourself in the shoes of a global nomad and choose which way you want to go. * BNE Magazine Australia *

Intan Paramaditha is a writer and academic. Her novel The Wandering, translated from the Indonesian by Stephen J. Epstein, was nominated for the Stella Prize in Australia and awarded the Tempo Best Literary Fiction Prize in Indonesia, the English PEN Translates Award and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America. She is the author of the short-story collection Apple and Knife and editor of Deviant Disciples- Indonesian Women Poets, part of the Translating Feminisms series by Tilted Axis Press. Her essay ‘On the Complicated Questions Around Writing About Travel’ was selected for The Best American Travel Writing 2021. She holds a PhD from New York University and teaches Media and Film Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney.

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