Daughters of the Air
12.5.2017
Tatiana “Pluta” Spektor was a mostly happy, if awkward, young girl—until her sociologist father was disappeared during Argentina’s Dirty War. Sent a world away by her grieving mother to attend boarding school outside New York City, Pluta wrestles alone with the unresolved tragedy and at last runs away: to the streets of Brooklyn in 1980, where she figuratively—and literally—spreads her wings. Told with haunting fabulist imagery by debut novelist Anca L. Szilágyi, this searing tale of love, loss, estrangement, and coming of age is an unflinching exploration of the personal devastation wrought by political repression.
About the Author Anca L. Szilágyi
Photo credit: Sarah Salcedo
Courtesy of Tall Firs Productions
Anca L. Szilágyi grew up in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, Gastronomica, and Fairy Tale Review, among other publications. She is the recipient of the inaugural Artist Trust / Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award, a Made at Hugo House fellowship, and awards from the Vermont Studio Center, 4Culture, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, and the Jack Straw Cultural Center. The Stranger hailed Anca as one of the "fresh new faces in Seattle fiction." She lives in Seattle with her husband.
Follow Anca at ancawrites.com or on Twitter @ancawrites.
"A chilling and beautiful novel that has left its indelible mark on me—I am simply in awe of Anca Szilagyi's prose."
—Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!, Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
When Pluta’s father, a university professor, disappears amid the turmoil of Argentina’s Dirty War, her family’s idyllic life crumbles. Unsure where he’s been taken or whether he’s even alive, Pluta and her mother struggle to cope with the disappearance—and to voice their fears and pain to one another.
Exiled to a boarding school in New York and churning with unresolved grief, Pluta runs away to Brooklyn in 1980. Her harrowing and surreal experiences on the dangerous streets soon threaten to destroy her completely—but may also at last break through the suffocating silence that has held her family captive.
Magical realist imagery infuses the landscape of devastation wrought by political repression in Anca L. Szilagyi’s searing coming-of-age novel, which Shelf Awareness calls “a striking debut from a writer to watch.”
Praise for Daughters of the Air
“Isabel and Pluta’s isolation get to the heart of what’s driving this novel: the many shames of political violence and the trauma of uncertainty. It’s easy to see the injustice of Argentina’s Dirty War in all its terrible dimension in hindsight, but what Szilágyi reveals is the sheer torment of experiencing it while it was happening without the benefit of perspective or reflection.”
- Leena Soman for Cleaver Magazine
“…I want to read a book that pushes me so far beyond my own experience as a human and a writer that I’m already off the cliff and halfway to a crushing death before I realize what’s happening. Daughters of the Air took me there.”