Strangers at the Port

Curtis - who was included on Granta’s recent Best of Young British Novelists list - writes dazzlingly confident prose, too rich to be called spare yet without any superfluous weight. She writes the island as if she were Celine Sciamma shooting Portrait of a Lady on Fire – Francesca Peacock * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *An incredible novel about how the quiet, ritualistic lives of a pair sisters are shaken by the arrival of strangers on their island – Anna Bonet * THE I PAPER *Strangers at the Port is both a fascinating delve into the small, personal stories sacrificed to the grander sweep of history and a provocative creation of a fable for our times – Emily Rhodes * THE SPECTATOR *Lushly poetic – Lucy Thynne * LITERARY REVIEW *Curtis’s writing is beautiful * GOOD READING *Reading this wonderfully oblique historical tale is a little like looking at the way light refracts through a prism: its meanings and impressions disperse along its journey to reveal what the author herself has termed ‘the slippery overlap between history, fiction and memory’ … Fascinating – Catherine Jarvie * MARIE CLAIRE, Best Books of 2023 *Magnificent – Cal Revely-Calder * TELEGRAPH REVIEW, Books of the Year *Stubbornly enigmatic * SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, Books of the Year *A mesmeric and lyrical novel about a fictive island and its inhabitants, which eschews narrative convention in favour of something more elusive, fractured, and choral … truly original – Ralf Webb * GRANTA, Books of the Year *

Lauren Aimee Curtis was born in Sydney. Her first book, Dolores, was shortlisted for the Readings Prize, the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing, and was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year. She has written for Granta, The White Review and Sydney Review of Books, among other publications. In 2023, she was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists.

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