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  • Published: 3 January 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241383087
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download

Territory of Light




This powerfully tender portrait of a single mother in 1970s Tokyo is the biggest Penguin Classics publication of 2018

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima, read by Rina Takasaki.
Territory of Light is the radiant story of a young woman, living alone in Tokyo with her two-year-old daughter. Its twelve chapters follow the first year of the narrator's separation from her husband. The novel is full of light, sometimes comforting and sometimes dangerous: sunlight streaming through windows, dappled light in the park, distant fireworks, dazzling floodwater, de-saturated streetlamps and mysterious explosions. The delicate prose is beautifully patterned: the cumulative effect is disarmingly powerful and bright after-images remain in your mind for a long time afterwards.

  • Published: 3 January 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241383087
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download

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Praise for Territory of Light

Wonderfully poetic ... extraordinary freshness ... a Virginia Woolf quality

Margaret Drabble, BBC Radio 3

Tsushima evades any label, her fiction transcends gender to focus on the existential loneliness that is at the heart of humanity.

Kris Kosaka, Japan Times

Spiky, atmospheric and intimate, filled with moments of strangeness that linger in the mind

The Spectator

In this short, powerful novel lurk the joy and guilt of single parents everywhere

Guardian

This exquisite and poignant novel . . . will resonate with single mothers always and everywhere

Shami Chakrabarti

An extraordinary book . . . cool analytic intelligence propelled by sudden eruptions of passion

Lisa Appignanesi

An astonishing and exquisite masterpiece about love, motherhood, female independence, and the restoration of a damaged family. Yuko Tsushima is an unforgettable name alongside great masters like Virginia Woolf, Alice Munro and Elizabeth Strout

J. M. Lee, author of The Investigation